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Data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) show that self-employment (nonfarm and nonprofessional) accounts for as much as 7% of all yearly labor supplied by young white males (aged 20-39 in the period 1979-2000). On the other hand, nearly 30% of the individuals covered by the data have at least one year of experience as a self-employer in the relevant period. The goal of this paper is to develop a coherent framework that accounts for these two contrasting figures, which together indicate the importance of understanding not only entry into but also exit from self-employment. Specifically, I present and estimate a life-cycle model of entrepreneurial choice and wealth accumulation, using a subsample of white males aged 20 to 39 from the NLSY79. In addition, the model includes two basic components of human capital (educational attainment and labor experience) aimed at a better capturing the observed patterns of labor supply, as well as those of income profiles and wealth accumulation over the life cycle. Counterfactual experiments with the use of the estimated model indicate that relaxation of borrowing constraints increases the average duration of self-employment, especially for the non-college-educated, whereas injections of business capital or self-employment-specific human capital only induce entries into self-employment that are of short duration.

Bibliography Citation

Adachi, Takanori. A Life-Cycle Model of Entrepreneurial Choice: Understanding Entry into and Exit from Self-Employment. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, May 2009.

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Almost half of postsecondary students are currently enrolled in community colleges. These institutions imply that even amongst students with the same degree outcome there is considerable heterogeneity in the path taken to get there. I estimate the life-cycle private and social returns to the different postsecondary paths and sequential decisions made by the students using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). My approach highlights both the benefits and the costs of different postsecondary choices, as well as taking account of the fact that wage premia are not constant over the life-cycle. I find positive, significant social and private returns for most postsecondary paths and decisions. Significantly lower opportunity and direct costs for paths that involve community college make the internal returns to these paths high. Even for paths that lead to the same final degree, returns and present values are different due to different costs and earnings over the life-cycle. I also analyze the different programs and majors offered by community colleges separately. For this, I supplement the analysis in the NLSY79 with additional data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Survey (BPS), the Census, and the Current Population Survey (CPS). I estimate high returns to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors, business, and health majors at community college as compared to other majors. I find that both occupational and academic associate's degrees give significant returns to men and women.

Bibliography Citation

Agan, Amanda Y. The Returns to Community College. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Chicago, 2013.

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Extant scholarship has identified the paths of racial wealth inequality to be primarily due to income differences, differential rates of home ownership, and intergenerational wealth transfers. A separate area of scholarly inquiry has highlighted the importance of labor unions in raising wages, increasing the availability of fringe benefits, and increasing pension/retirement assets. Since minorities experience wage returns on par with whites under labor union contracts "which helps to narrow the racial wage gap" it is possible that labor union employment may also help ameliorate the well-documented racial wealth gap. Prior research has failed to examine the possible effect of labor union employment on racial differences in pension/retirement wealth, home ownership, or total wealth. In the first assessment of its kind, I argue for the importance of labor unions as a labor market institution, which can increase the ability of workers to accumulate wealth by providing stable employment, increased wages and increased access to non-wage packages. Representing the synthesis of disparate research areas, I use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1988 to 2004 to examine several ways in which unions can affect wealth by race for whites, blacks and Hispanics. The results suggest that labor union employment increases access to and enrollment in pension plans, and constricts the racial pension/retirement wealth gap by limiting white pension/retirement wealth. Labor union employment increases the likelihood of home ownership for all races, but does not have an effect on the home equity in that home. Finally, labor union employment similarly constricts the racial gaps for non-pension and total wealth, also by limiting the wealth accumulated by whites, but leaving the wealth of blacks and Hispanics unchanged. Collectively, the results of this dissertation find labor unions do impact wealth, but in ways not anticipated prior to analysis of empiri
cal data.

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The dissertation is composed by three chapters. In Chapter 2 (coauthored with Matthew Wiswall) I develop new results for the identification and estimation of the technology of children's skill formation when children's skills are unobserved. In Chapter 4 (coauthored with Giuseppe Sorrenti) I study the effect of family income and maternal hours worked on both cognitive and behavioral child development.

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The co-occurrence of sexual behavior and substance use among adolescents--both licit and illicit--is well substantiated in the socio-medical literature. However, limited studies have been published which focus on the context and psychosocial relationships which predispose youth to engage in risk behavior. The interaction between environment and health risk behavior during teen years can set the stage for later-life deleterious health outcomes. Thus, this research examines how adolescent self-rated risk proneness in conjunction with underlying psychosocial mechanisms predicts the likelihood of engaging in concurrent sexual behavior and alcohol use.

The current literature has demonstrated the strong association between the co-occurrence of illicit drug use and sexual behavior. However, tantamount to this relationship are, psychosocial factors which, when examined concomitant with health risk behaviors grouped by maternal educational attainment, will help elucidate differences between categories of youth at risk for compromised mental and physical well-being. The Bronfenbrenner ecological framework is utilized to substantiate the relevance of health risk behaviors, environment and the importance of studying psychosocial factors in multivariate models.

The data selected for analysis to both demonstrate these relationships and identify risk profiles originate from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), Young Adult 1998 cohort. Partitioning the NLSY 1998 cohort by mother's education tests how risk proneness as a mediator differs by maternal highest grade completed, as it affects adolescent deleterious behavior. These data are renowned for an oversampling of African Americans and are nationally representative of other ethnic groups such as Hispanics and Asians, requiring the application of an algebraic weight to normalize against the US population. Therefore, the key findings discovered in this study are: (1) the mediational effect in the pathway
to health risk behaviors is risk proneness; (2) reported depressive illness symptoms are the underlying mechanism of risk proneness; (3) the path model is robust when tested among different groups using the Bronfenbrenner ecosystem paradigm; and (4) the weighting technique is vital to preserving the original distribution of the population, since the study sample needs to reflect the actual proportion of racial/ethnic groups in the US population.

Bibliography Citation

Agre, Lynn A. Mediating Role of Risk Proneness on the Ecology of Adolescent Health Risk Behavior. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 2009.

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The present study was based on analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a multi-year national sample of young adults which began in 1979 (NLSY79). To explore the role that father involvement during adolescence has on gender role ideology of young adult Hispanic males and females, data from 406 Hispanic participants, a subset of the children of NLSY79 female respondents, were reviewed from the 1992 through 2002 biannual survey waves. Gender role ideology is the extent to which opinions and beliefs about family and work roles differ based on sex, and range along a continuum from traditional to egalitarian. Reciprocal-role theory suggests that fathers are instrumental in shaping the gender role ideology of their children. Multivariate analyses indicated that father involvement during adolescence contributed significantly to gender role ideology of young adult Hispanic males (N = 200), even after controlling for mother involvement and other contextual variables (participant's age, birth order, educational aspirations, maternal education and maternal employment). Increased positive father involvement contributed to less egalitarian gender role ideologies for young adult males. No significant contribution was found for father involvement on gender role ideology of young adult Hispanic females (N = 206) after controlling for mother involvement and other contextual variables. Increased maternal education and young adult educational aspirations were positively associated with more egalitarian gender role ideologies for both male and female Hispanics. Interestingly, both male and female participants endorsed gender role ideologies that were clearly skewed towards the egalitarian end of the scale. Findings suggest that father involvement during adolescence has a significant role in the gender role ideology of young adult Hispanic males, while educational factors have a secondary, but also important role in the gender role ideology of both male and female Hispanics. Implications for counseling psychologists are discussed, with particular focus on Hispanic clients. Barriers to the increased positive involvement of fathers, such as maternal gate-keeping, are also explored.

Bibliography Citation

Aguiar, Lyndon J. Father Involvement and Gender Role Ideology of Young Hispanic Adults: Analysis Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Education, New York University, 2009.

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Academic interest in self-employment has grown rapidly in recent decades. However, relatively little is known about the longitudinal patterns of young self-employed workers. In the first essay, I examine the patterns of self-employment that appear in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). I find that most of self-employed workers hold wage jobs before entering self-employment and come back to wage sector after experiencing one or two self-employment spells. Self-employment jobs differ in terms of industry distribution, for both men and women and they are – female self-employment jobs, in particular – likely to entail changes in industry. Additionally, I find that female self-employment spells are more likely to be followed by a large percent of time nonemployed and a small percent of time in the same industry compared to the wage employment while the opposite are true for the male self-employment spells.

Risk tolerance and liquidity constraints are widely believed to be key determinants of self-employment, but their independent effects have proved difficult to identify. In the second essay, I specify a theoretical model that illustrates how individual risk tolerance and liquidity constraints affect the decision to become self-employed. I then tackle the empirical identification problem by constructing a measure of risk tolerance that is corrected for reporting error, varies with age and assets, and allows for the endogeneity of assets. In contrast to previous studies that use regional variation in housing prices as an instrument for assets, I address the fact that housing appreciation affects homeowners and nonowners differently. I find that risk tolerant workers are more likely to be self-employed than are their less risk tolerant counterparts. However, net asset levels have an insignificant effect on self-employment entry once absolute risk tolerance is properly taken into account.

The absence of successful businesses owned by minorities, and by blacks in particular, is a concern for policy makers. In the third essay, I exploit detailed work history data in the NLSY79 to provide new evidence on the reasons behind the race gap in self-employment. My analysis of an "age uniform" sample of men, all of whom are observed from age 22 to age 40, reveals that racial differences in cross-sectional self-employment rates are largely due to the fact that minority workers' self-employment spells are relatively short-lived. Moreover, I find that minority workers' relatively high exit rates from self-employment are caused primarily by transitions to nonemployment. Estimates from a multinomial logit model of self-employment exits suggest that minority workers' weak attachment to the labor market prior to entering self-employment is an important determinant of their self-employment to nonemployment transitions, while lack of prior industry and self-employment experience contributes to minorities' transitions to nonself-employment.

Bibliography Citation

Ahn, Taehyun. Essays on Self-Employment of Young Workers. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2008.

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An increase in romantic relationship conflict has been found to occur during the transition to adulthood. Previous research has made links to subsequent relationship conflict and family of origin relationship dynamics. To examine the effect of the parent and parent-child relationships on later romantic conflict, a prospective analysis was conducted. Using a nationally representative longitudinal dataset, The National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, the effects of interparental and parent-child relationships during the adolescent years were examined in relation to later experiences with relational conflict. An innovation of the current study was the examination of not only destructive relationship processes, but also constructive properties between parents and with their children. Growth curve analysis was used to explore the pattern of conflict over a four year consecutive time period (N = 3,346). Interparental and parent-child constructive relationship dimensions were not significant, regardless of parent or child's gender. The parent-child destructive relationship dimension was significantly associated with relationship conflict in emerging adult romantic relationships, although it functioned differently for the mother/child and father/child relationships. Race also served as a factor in differences in experiences with high levels of relationship conflict, with higher levels of conflict in Black and Hispanic emerging adults. Future directions and implications for marriage and family therapists are discussed.

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Purpose: Previous studies have documented persistent disparities in the rate of low birth weight between African Americans and Whites in the U.S. across socioeconomic strata based on educationally defined and income-related measures. Although such findings do not preclude the notion that the disparity in the risk of low birth weight between African Americans and Whites in the U.S. is primarily attributable to non-socioeconomic racial characteristics, the validity of such a conclusion is in part dependent on the assumption that adequate measures of socioeconomic position have been utilized in previous research. Given the potential for residual confounding by socioeconomic position associated with the exclusion of wealth-related measures, previous estimates concerning the race-related risk of low birth weight net prevalent inequalities in economic well-being may be biased. Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), the current study proposed to address this issue by examining if there is an association between wealth and the risk of low birth weight independent of other resource-based indicators of socioeconomic position, as well the extent to which adjusting for differentials in wealth produces a greater reduction in the disparity in the risk of low birth weight between African Americans and Whites in the U.S. than that observed by adjusting only for differentials in educational attainment and/or poverty level.

Methods: Multiple GEE models were generated utilizing demographic, pregnancy-related, educational, poverty, and wealth-related variables. Substantive comparisons across GEE models were done based on an estimate of the percent reduction in the baseline odds ratio for low birth weight in comparing non-Hispanic Blacks to non-Hispanic Whites associated with individual and collective socioeconomic related adjustments.

Conclusion: Differentials in current wealth status appear to have little impact on observed disparities in low birth weight between non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White births independent of traditional socioeconomic indicators such as income and maternal education.

Bibliography Citation

Allston, Adam. The Significance of Wealth in Understanding Associations between Race and the Risk of Low Birth Weight. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins University, 2011.

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The first essay expands on previous work examining the effects of SNAP participation on adult obesity. Previous research provides some evidence that SNAP participation may have a small positive effect on weight gain for women and no significant effect on men. However, additional research has found that misreporting of SNAP participation in surveys is prevalent and that analysis of program effects when participation is misclassified (misreported) can produce estimates that are biased and misleading. Until now, nearly all studies examining the effects of SNAP on adult obesity have ignored the issue of respondent misreporting. This chapter uses state-level policy variables regarding SNAP administration to instrument for SNAP participation for NLSY79 respondents. To address respondent misreporting I adopt an approach based on parametric methods for misclassified binary dependent variables that produces consistent estimates when using instrumental variables. This study is the first to document the considerable rates of SNAP participation under-reporting in the NLSY79 dataset. In addition, this study finds that, although SNAP participation increases adult BMI and the likelihood of being obese, without correcting for misreporting bias the estimates are overstated by nearly 100 percent.

The second essay takes a different approach to investigate the intensive margin effects of
SNAP on adult obesity. To mitigate the severity of endogenous participation and misreporting
biases, I employ a strategy that examines only individuals who report participating in SNAP. I
utilize a quasi-experimental variation in SNAP amount per adult due to the timing of school
eligibility for children. The identification examines intensive margin changes SNAP benefits
due to changes in household composition. This study finds that increases in SNAP benefits
available to adults actually reduce BMI and the probability of being severely obese.

Bibliography Citation

Almada, Lorenzo Nicolas. Essays on the Effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on Adult Obesity. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Georgia State University, 2014.

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This dissertation investigates the effect of neighborhood social context on obesity and educational achievement among youth. I use restricted geo-coded panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) between 1986 and 2008 and a within-child fixed effects approach to identify causal effects for movers and stayers separately. The fixed effects approach takes advantage of repeated measures of independent and dependent variables in order to eliminate bias that is due to time-invariant unobserved characteristics of children and families.

Among the general sample of youth, the results suggest that long-term exposure to neighborhood unemployment increases the odds of being obese while moving to affluence decreases the odds of being obese. Among Black youth, long-term exposure to neighborhood unemployment also increases the odds of being obese while Latino youth were sensitive only to a more recent exposure to neighborhood unemployment.

Among the general sample of youth, gentrification increases achievement scores. Among poor and urban Black children and poor and urban Latino children, exposure to neighborhood unemployment and neighborhood poverty generally reduces achievement scores. Moreover, the negative effects of neighborhood unemployment and neighborhood poverty are stronger among disadvantaged youth compared to the general sample of youth. Surprisingly, Black neighbors increase the achievement scores of poor and urban minority youth while neighborhood unemployment increases achievement among poor and urban Latinos. Among poor and urban minority youth, gentrification has no effect on achievement scores while moving severely disadvantaged Latinos to affluence decreases their achievement scores.

Bibliography Citation

Alvarado, Steven Elias. The Effect of Neighborhood Context on Obesity and Educational Achievement among Youth. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, 2011.

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I evaluate the effects of regulations that limit the availability of abortion services, as well as the impact of policies that subsidize contraception, on abortion and contraceptive choices of young women and on their life-cycle fertility, schooling and labor supply. I specify and structurally estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of abortion, contraceptive use, schooling and labor supply decisions using data from the NLSY97 combined with aggregate abortion provider data from the Guttmacher Institute. Variation across time and space in state-specific regulations and in the availability of abortion providers at the county level provides a valuable source of identification for the model parameters. My estimation approach allows for underreporting of abortions by NLSY respondents. Policy simulations show that restrictions on abortions increase contraceptive use, which moderates the effect of abortion restrictions on birth rates. Eliminating access to abortion services has significant effects on women's schooling and lifetime earnings. The average effect of restricting access to abortion on lifetime welfare is small, but there is substantial heterogeneity in welfare losses across women. As an alternative to abortion restrictions, I find that providing free contraception would increase contraceptive use and decrease abortion rates substantially.

Bibliography Citation

Amador Osuna, Diego. The Consequences of Abortion and Contraception Policies on Young Women's Reproductive Choices, Schooling and Labor Supply. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 2015.

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This dissertation focuses on understanding the sources and implications of different dimensions of inequality in the US. In particular, the dissertation focuses on nutritional and gender inequalities.

The second chapter, which is work performed jointly with Tatiana Baron and Pengpeng Xiao, studies the drivers of the differential wage growth between men and women. We document the widening gender wage gap and the gender differences in the transition rates into and out of employment and human capital dynamics over the life cycle in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 (NLSY79). We then develop an equilibrium search model to assess the extent to which labor market frictions, human capital accumulation, and motherhood contribute to the differential wage growth between men and women. In our framework, men and women have exogenously different transition probabilities and diverging human capital processes. Furthermore, women's careers can be impacted by maternity leave coverage policies. Firms respond to these gender differences when posting wages in market equilibrium. Results are in progress.

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This work investigates the implications of human capital specialization as well as the challenges of teacher evaluation. The first two chapters contrast occupational college majors with more general courses of study, for example mathematics versus accounting. The first chapter introduces the Herfindahl-Hirschman index as an objective measure of the occupational concentration of a college major. Outcomes are documented using the American Community Survey 2009 and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Occupational majors are associated with higher wages and are not correlated with either the incidence or the duration of unemployment spells. These findings indicate that occupational study may confer productivity gains without augmenting unemployment risk.

The second chapter uses a life cycle model to evaluate the role of occupational study in providing information about occupational preferences. The model is estimated using a sample from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The results suggest that the opportunity to gain preference information is an important advantage of occupational courses of study. Furthermore, consistent with Chapter 1, the productivity gain from occupational study is greater than the gain from general study.

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This study explores the conduits and barriers to identity transformation and successful desistance for a sample of high-risk adolescents transitioning into adulthood in the United States. I use multivariate analyses of data drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997-2011 (rounds 1-15), to answer several research questions: 1) Who among high-risk youth are most likely to undergo a cognitive transformation? 2) Who is most likely to desist? 3) What impact does cognitive transformation have on chances of desistance? 4) What are the similar/different factors relevant for race-ethnic groups in the cognitive transformation and desistance process? This study investigates the impact of both social bonds and an individual's cognitive change between 1997 and 2000 on criminality in 2000 and 2001. My findings show that Hispanic respondents who envisioned better futures for themselves had decreased chances of a future arrest compared to those whose future expectations did not change or worsened. I also found that there may be racial differences in the identity change and desistance process because black respondents were less likely than Hispanic respondents to envision positive future changes. This research adds a social psychological perspective to the desistance literature and is necessary in light of the high arrest/incarceration rates (especially among blacks) and the subsequent large population of formerly incarcerated people in the United States.

Bibliography Citation

Anderson, Annika Yvette. The Impact of Socio-demographic Characteristics and Cognitive Transformation on Desistance from High Risk Behaviors. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Washington State University, 2015.

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Chapter 2 takes a micro-level approach by exploring the relationship between fertility and gender norms in the United States. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY 79), I find that both men and women with progressive views on gender equity have lower fertility than their traditional counterparts, though these results were stronger, more consistent, and more significant across models for women.

Bibliography Citation

Anderson, Thomas. Three Essays on the Social, Economic, and Demographic Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Demography, University of Pennsylvania, 2015.

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This dissertation explores issues regarding the legitimacy of the Flynn effect by using the National-Longitudinal-Survey-of-Youth Children (NLSYC) data, in which there are scores from a mathematics subscale of an achievement test, the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (the PIAT). Study I explores the Flynn effect within population subgroups by demographic characteristics: gender, race/ethnicity, maternal education, household income, and urbanization within the PIAT Mathematic (PIAT-M) subscale. Study II explores the Flynn effect at the item level of the PIAT-M and identifies possible causes of the Flynn Effect using expert ratings of item contents. Results indicated interaction effects for mothers' education or household incomes, specifically, children with older college educated mothers or children born to higher income households had seen an accelerated Flynn effect in their PIAT-M scores than their peers with older lower educated mother or lower income households. At the item level, reasoning domain most consistently predicted the Flynn effect for the children with average IQ. Recall, computation, reasoning and algebra were predictive of the Flynn effect when children in both extreme ends of the IQ scale were included in the analysis. These results add to the literature in understanding the operation of the Flynn effect that had not been carefully studied in the past.

Bibliography Citation

Ang, Siew Ching. Flynn Effect Within Demographic Subgroups and Within Items: Moving from the General to the Specific. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Psychology, The University of Oklahoma, 2008..

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This dissertation consists of three distinct essays on the economics of labor. The first two chapters study the effects of fertility incentives on labor supply and the third examines the relationship between parental income changes and the outcomes of college students.

The first two chapters of this dissertation examines the labor supply effects of fertility incentives by making use of two major policy changes that occurred in Canada over the past 25 years: the Quebec Parental Insurance Program which provides generous parental leave benefits and the series of cash-transfer fertility incentives introduced in Quebec in the 1980s. The empirical work for these projects was conducted using confidential versions of the Canadian Census and the Labour Force Surveys on-site at Statistics Canada. I find that while increases in the generosity of parental leave benefits substantially increase the birth rate and induce increases in labor supply among women of child bearing age, cash-transfer fertility incentives only slightly increase birth rates and decrease female labor supply. The cost of each additional birth due to an increase in the generosity of parental leave programs is $15,828 in 2008 Canadian dollars, whereas the cost of an additional birth due to cash-transfer fertility incentives is $223,625 in 2008 Canadian dollars. Therefore, paid parental leave is a low-cost way to increase fertility whereas the price per additional birth due to cash-transfer fertility incentives is quite high.

The third chapter studies the effect of parental income changes on students who have already matriculated into college. From my empirical analysis using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I find that individuals who experience large year-to-year declines in parental income while they are in college respond mainly by increasing their term-time labor supply and do not adjust their use of financial aid significantly. Students who encounter large parental income losses are also more likely to experience periods of non-enrollment prior to receiving their degrees, but by the end of the survey period studied are also more likely to have completed their baccalaureate or associates degrees. Responses to parental income declines do not vary substantially by parental income levels at age 18.

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Researchers consistently find that youths who work longer hours during high school tend to have higher rates of crime and substance use. On the basis of this and other research showing the negative developmental impact of an "intensive" work commitment during high school, the National Research Council (1998) recommended that federal lawmakers place limits on the maximum number of hours per week that teenagers are allowed to work during the school year. However, recent empirical research demonstrates the possibility of severe bias due to failure to control for unobserved sources of heterogeneity. I take advantage of two unique characteristics of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to assess the veracity of the claim that longer work hours are causally related to elevated involvement in crime and substance use. First, since the same respondents are followed over a period of five years, I use individual fixed effects to adjust for the omission of relevant time-stable covariates. Second, I exploit state-to-state variation in the restrictiveness of child labor laws governing the number of hours per week allowed during the school year, and the fact that these restrictions are relaxed (and eventually expire) with increasing age. In this model—based on a fixed-effects instrumental variables (FEIV) estimator—identification of the "work intensity effect" on problem behavior is predicated on exogenous within-individual variation in school-year work hours attributable to the easing of child labor restrictions as youths age out of their legal status as minors. The attractiveness of the FEIV estimator is its ability to eliminate bias in the estimated "work intensity effect" due to omitted stable and dynamic variables. The model thus provides an especially powerful test of the thesis that intensive employment during the school year causally aggravates involvement in problem behavior. The empirical results demonstrate that longer work hours are associated with a significant decrease in adolescent crime, contrary to virtually all prior research. The results for adolescent substance use are mixed, suggesting the possibility that longer work hours either increase or have no effect on substance use, depending on whether a fixed-effects or first-differences procedure is implemented.

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In this dissertation, I examine the role of parental housing tenure on stratification processes in the contemporary United States. The study employs two national longitudinal surveys, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Using propensity score matching estimation, the study finds the following. First, public housing residence has a detrimental effect on housing self-sufficiency and on car ownership of black offspring but no effect on whites. Secondly, long-term residence in a single-family owner-occupied home has a significant positive effect on the housing tenure of offspring; however, the positive effect of single-family owner-occupied homes differs by race, income status, and the housing career of parents. In particular, families who initially lived in a multi-family renter-occupied home (a category predominantly occupied by black, low-income families) are less capable of translating the advantage of single-family owner-occupied homes to offspring. Hence, by examining two elements of the American housing policy (public housing and a single-family owner occupied home), the author demonstrates that the American housing policy has contributed to racial and class inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.

Social Determinants of College Completion and Wealth Mobility: A Life Course Approach to Educational Completion among Young Baby Boomers
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Colorado State University, 2015
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
College Graduates; Employment, Youth; Event History; High School Completion/Graduates; Life Course; Wealth

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The first study compares results from an event history model of high school completion and argues for treating educational completion as an event in time rather than as a binary or categorical outcome. That section offers a methodological contribution to current scholarship as sociologists of education are increasingly taking advantage of longitudinal data sets. The next essay asks how some characteristics and conditions early in individuals' lives may influence the timing of their college completions. I consider teenage childbearing, family poverty, maternal education and other factors in an attempt to provide an alternative to the conventional understanding of race-ethnicity as a predictor of individuals' conditional odds of college completion. The fourth essay departs from the emphasis on “timing of college completion” as an outcome and instead focuses on several under-examined questions about wealth mobility (movement within the wealth distribution over the life course) and whether timely college completion and adolescent employment are associated with upward wealth mobility over the adult life course. The final section also makes a basic contribution to social scientists' understanding of wealth dynamics among the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's late baby boomer cohorts.

Bibliography Citation

Aronson, Matt. Social Determinants of College Completion and Wealth Mobility: A Life Course Approach to Educational Completion among Young Baby Boomers. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Colorado State University, 2015.

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In the third chapter, co-authored with Tong Li, we test the effects of marriage expectations on college major choices. The data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) show that there are significant differences in marriage realizations of college graduates from different majors. Selection of a major with different marriage expectations can present one potential explanation for why there are observed differences in the marriage outcomes. To test this hypothesis, we develop a copula-based econometric framework that incorporates multinomial regressors (major choice) in binary outcome response (marriage realization) models. Our test results show that the effects of marriage expectations can not be rejected, even after individual characteristics and expected earnings are controlled for.

Bibliography Citation

Arslan, Hayri Alper. Essays in College Admissions and College Major Choice. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University, 2018.

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This dissertation includes three essays on the economics of job satisfaction. The first, "The Role of Firm Size and Performance Pay in Determining Employee Job Satisfaction", uses the Working in Britain 2000 data to analyze the impact that performance pay has on job satisfaction. The paper argues that the potential positive influences, eliciting greater effort and pay and a tighter connection to the objectives of the firm, are more likely in larger firms. The estimates therefore confirm that even though large firms are known to have lower job satisfaction, proper use of performance pay can ameliorate this otherwise negative association.

The second essay, "Fringe Benefits and Job Satisfaction?" uses waves 1996 - 2004 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to study the impact that fringe benefits have on job satisfaction. Fringe benefits stand as an important part of compensation but confirming their role in determining job satisfaction has been mixed at best. The theory suggesting this role is ambiguous. Fringe benefits represent a desirable form of compensation but might result in decreased earnings and reduced job mobility. In this second essay fringe benefits are established as significant and positive determinants of job satisfaction, even after controlling for individual fixed effects and testing for the endogeneity of fringe benefits.

The final essay discusses union exposure and its impact on job satisfaction, specifically that of former union workers. The paper uses all waves of the NLSY to study how length of exposure to a union negatively impacts current job satisfaction for former union members. Furthermore, the length of accumulated time after a worker leaves a union job is positively related to job satisfaction. Therefore, unions have a lasting negative influence on the job satisfaction of workers, even after they leave the union workplace.

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I analyze the demand for alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, and marijuana using a structural dynamic model. Previous studies have used cross-sectional data to analyze the demand for various substances or longitudinal data to analyze the demand for individual substances such as cigarettes. I develop a model that details inter-temporal and contemporaneous relationships in the demand for these substances, and estimate the model using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979. I contribute to the literature by explicitly modeling gateway effects and addiction in a dynamic, utility maximizing framework.

The results obtained from the duration models suggest that unobserved heterogeneity and duration dependence are important in explaining substance use. The results from the structural model reveal that the impact of past consumption on substance use is large, that alcohol and cigarettes are contemporaneous gross substitutes, that cigarettes and marijuana are contemporaneous gross substitutes, and that alcohol and marijuana are contemporaneous complements. Policy simulations suggest that individuals react rationally to price changes and that alcohol use and cigarette smoking act as gateways to marijuana use.

Bibliography Citation

Asarkaya, Yakup. Substance Consumption among Youth: A Dynamic Analysis of Alcohol, Cigarette and Marijuana Use. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Virginia, August 2010.

Data for this dissertation were drawn from five waves (2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010) of interview data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) consisting of 16,868 person-waves constructed from 6,392 adolescents enrolled in the study. Using a temporal ordering data analysis technique, stressful events from a previous interview wave were utilized as explanatory variables in predicting current depression and substance use. Other variables in the analysis, like social support, were believed to be acting contemporaneously to reduce depression and substance use. Using generalized least squares regression (GLS) for panel data for depression and generalized estimating equations (GEE) for panel data in STATA for the dichotomous substance use outcomes, results indicated that stressful events measured in the past were significantly associated with current depression, and with current substance use, controlling even for prior depression and substance use. Results also indicated that social support exerts a protective effect against the strain-depression and strain-substance use relationship. Race-specific and gender-specific modeling of each outcome demonstrated marked differences among relevant factors, with gender-specific models better explaining depression, and race-specific models better predicting substance use. Moderation analysis of relevant predictors and these key social statuses indicated that several salient and significant differences existed among the effects of the explanatory variables. Theoretical and policy contributions from this study are related to empirical support for the inclusion of depression as a negative affective state in general strain theory, while also reflecting important social structural conditions, like poverty, in predicting these relationships.

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Chapter 3 investigates the evolution over the last two decades in the wage returns to schooling and early work experience. Using data from the 1979 and 1997 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we isolate changes in skill prices from changes in composition by estimating a dynamic model of schooling and work decisions. Importantly, this allows us to account for the endogenous nature of the changes in educational and accumulated work experience over this time period. We find an increase over this period in the returns to working in high school, but a decrease in the returns to working while in college. We also find an increase in the incidence of working in college, but that any detrimental impact of in-college work experience is offset by changes in other observable characteristics. Overall, our decomposition of the evolution in skill premia suggests that both price and composition effects play an important role. The role of unobserved ability is also important.

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This thesis has two chapters. In the first chapter, I study the effect of college education, intelligence, and self-confidence on entrepreneurship using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth - 1979. Controlling for intelligence and self-confidence I find that college education has no effect on business survival, but increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. Intelligence boosts business survival, even accounting for selection. Moreover smarter individuals are more likely to start incorporated firms but less likely to found unincorporated ones. Self-confidence increases the likelihood of starting a firm and has a positive effect on business survival. These results suggest that existing conflicting evidence on this topic is driven by the failure to effectively control for unobserved characteristics.

In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Tino Sanandaji, we study the effect of taxation on entrepreneurship, taking into account both the amount of entry and the quality of new ventures. We show that even with risk neutral agents and no tax evasion progressive taxes can increase entrepreneurial entry, while reducing average firm quality. So called "success taxes" increase startup of lower value business ideas by reducing the option value of pursuing better projects. This suggests that the most common measure used in the literature, the likelihood of entry into self-employment, may underestimate the adverse effect of taxation.

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This dissertation is comprised of two essays examining labor market outcomes of young adults within the last two decades. The first is motivated by critics of the U.S. education system's current emphasis on 4-year college education who suggest the returns to a 2-year college degree, especially within a career and technology education (CTE) field, could exceed those to a 4-year degree. Evidence on this question has been lacking, in no small part due to the problem of accounting for selection of youth into different schooling choices, which depends on their verbal, math, and mechanical abilities (among other factors). I help fill this void by estimating a generalized Roy model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, in which youth choose among 5 college alternatives: no college, 2-year CTE, 2-year non-CTE, 4-year STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and 4-year non-STEM programs. The results permit me to construct consistent estimates of the expected cumulative earnings between the ages of 25 and 29 after each college choice for every individual in my sample. These counterfactual estimates reveal that 14% of current 4-year non-STEM students would expect higher early career earnings had they chosen the 2-year CTE path, yet the majority of these students would benefit even more from 4-year STEM pursuits. On average the 9% of high school graduates that maximize expected earnings from a 2-year CTE path, relative to all other college options, do not currently attend a four-year college. This paper finds these students do not simply possess low verbal and math abilities, but that a high mechanical ability is crucial in conferring a comparative advantage in earnings from 2-year CTE programs.

This second essay within this dissertation estimates how narrowly-defined mismatches between employees and occupations affect young adult job mobility. I construct new measures of academic skill mismatch, technical skill mismatch, and edu
cational mismatch using employee level data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and occupation-level data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). Skill mismatch measures capture the distance between an individual's tested abilities (in percentile terms) and the reported skill requirements of an occupation (in similar percentile terms). Estimation of a Cox proportional hazards model of job tenure reveals that a ten point increase in academic skill mismatch increases a worker's monthly hazard of leaving a job by 2.3%, yet technical skill mismatches have no effect. An employee is also 1.7% more likely to leave a job in any given month if ten percent fewer employees within their occupation possess the same level of education. The main benefit of my mismatch measures is their derivation from underlying individual and occupational characteristics. I demonstrate that these characteristics not only influence employee-occupation mismatch, but independently affect job turnover. Thus, their inclusion significantly alters estimates of how employee-occupation mismatches impact young adult job mobility.

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Today's military and a growing segment of the veteran population are drawn from groups likely to be disadvantaged in the civilian labor market--blacks and working class whites. While the relationship between veteran status and occupational outcomes have been intensively explored for the World War II, Korean and Vietnam-era cohorts, relatively little scholarly attention has focused the military as an institutional engine of social mobility since the 1973 transition from the Selective Service draft to the All Volunteer Force (AVF). In light of the demographic composition of those who join the military today, the impact of veteran status on life course outcomes may have broad impacts on inequality. The possibility that veteran status may be linked to spatial mobility is also under-explored.

This project uses seven decades of census data and 21 years of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth--1979 to identify the relationship between veteran status, spatial mobility, and social mobility in the late 20 th century. I focus on three questions: (1) do veterans and nonveterans vary in their migration behavior?; (2) do AVF veterans enjoy greater intergenerational occupational mobility or earn higher incomes than similar men who did not join the military?: and (3) do AVF veterans and nonveterans differ in their ability to use spatial mobility to access communities with greater economic opportunity or specific social characteristics?

I find that veterans exhibit higher rates of migration across the life course, and that this effect persists regardless of changes in military staffing policy and human capital differences between veterans and nonveterans. AVF veterans do not generally earn more money than do similar men without military experience, and rates of intergenerational occupational mobility for veterans and nonveterans are quite similar. Finally, black and white male veterans appear to be unable to leverage their elevated rates of spatial mobility to facilitate enhanced levels of locational attainment. While veterans are not disadvantaged in their ability to migrate into communities with more positive economic and social attributes, any returns to increased migration for veterans likely result from greater mobility and not from a disproportionate benefit from that movement.

Bibliography Citation

Bailey, Amy Kate. Effect of Veteran Status on Spatial and Socioeconomic Mobility: Outcomes for Black and White Men in the Late 20th Century. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 2008. DAI-A 69/09, Mar 2009.

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Occupational sex segregation, the gender wage gap, and ghettoization persist despite improvements in women's opportunities since World War II. Recent research calls for a focus on the social psychological factors in early life that affect women's career attainments to help us more fully understand the persistence of women's disadvantaged positions in paid work. This dissertation synthesizes prior research to develop a multilevel model of career goal formation by examining community context, mothers' attainments, and gender beliefs as factors that shape young women's career goals. It also considers the degree to which career goals and gender beliefs influence work outcomes in later life. I study the 1979 and 1998 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to identify early life factors that affect young women's career goals and to assess the extent to which these early goals influence women's employment situations in later life.

This dissertation has three main findings. First, I find that young women's early career goals are influenced by women's disadvantaged position in the labor force more generally, as manifested in relationships with their mothers and women's status in the broader community. Young women with mothers who have lower occupational earnings, lower occupational prestige, and work with more women are more likely to plan to work in occupations with lower earnings, prestige, and more women themselves. Second, part of the influence of community context and mothers' attainments is indirect through young women's beliefs about gender. Third, early career goals and gender beliefs have lasting and cumulative effects on women's attainments in later life. Young women with less ambitious career goals and more traditional gender beliefs complete fewer years of education and are less likely to work full-time in later life. In turn, less education and fewer work hours are associated with employment in occupations with more women, lower median weekly earnings, lower occupational prestige, and lower hourly wages. Overall, the results provide evidence of the social embeddedness of women's career goals, and the cumulative impact of early career goals and gender beliefs on women's mid-life attainments. In addition, the results suggest that women's disadvantaged position in the labor market persists partly because the career goals of each generation are influenced by the constraints and opportunities experienced by their predecessors.

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Immigrants tend to be healthier than their native born peers on many factors, including obesity. However, to date, research has produced contradictory results about the potential contributors of this relationship as well as the magnitude of this phenomenon. This research examines weight assimilation, using both a pooled sample and a Mexican-American specific sub-sample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort , as adolescents transition to adulthood. The negative health assimilation hypothesis states that overtime, there is convergence in the health between immigrant generations and natives. Examining this relationship longitudinally, using growth curve models, I find continued divergence rather than convergence. Immigrant generations weigh less at the beginning of the study period and gain less weight as they enter adulthood compared to native generations (1). In addition to documenting this phenomenon descriptively, this research also examined the different contexts that could contribute to this relationship, concentrating specifically on emerging young adult socioeconomic status and residence. Inequality in socioeconomic status contributes to health disparities, such that those with lower socioeconomic status have worse health than those with higher socioeconomic status. Immigrant children and children of immigrants often have lower origin socioeconomic status than children of natives and they tend to make great strides over the educational attainment of their parents. In addition, increases in educational attainment mean that children of immigrants spend an extended period of time in one of the most influential socializing institutions they will encounter during this phase of their life, college. Using OLS regression when the respondents are in between the ages of 24 to 28, I find that own emerging socioeconomic status, measured as education, is important to all generations, but this is especially true among the second generation, even controlling for family of origin socioeconomic status (2). Lastly, I examine the relationship between parental co-residence and weight using growth curve models. Strong immigrant families are suggested as one of the potential sources that allow immigrants and their children to overcome many of the disadvantages they face, such as disorganized neighborhoods and poverty. Also, immigrant children and children of immigrants are more likely to remain in their parents home longer and the implications this has on their adult outcomes differs from those found for children of natives. I find that non-parental co-residence is associated with weight gain among all generations, but only among the first and second generation is this weight gain not accounted for by partnering and childbearing (3). Other factors, perhaps related to acculturation and assimilation, drive this relationship for children of immigrants. These findings suggest that weight assimilation is a complex process, influenced by factors experienced in childhood, as suggested by the immigrants continued divergence in weight gain, and their immediate environment, as suggested by the importance of own emerging socioeconomic status and parental co-residence.

Bibliography Citation

Baker, Elizabeth H. Three Essays on BMI Trajectories by Generation during the Transition to Adulthood. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2013.

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Latent growth curve modeling is an increasingly popular approach for evaluating longitudinal data. Researchers tend to focus on overall model fit information or component model fit information when evaluating a latent growth curve model (LGCM). However, there is also an interest in understanding a given individual's level and pattern of change over time, specifically an interest in identifying observations with aberrant patterns of change. Thus it is also important to examine model fit at the level of the individual. Currently there are several proposed approaches for evaluating person level fit information from a LGCM including factor score based approaches (Bollen & Curran, 2006; Coffman & Millsap, 2006) and person log-likelihood based approaches (Coffman & Millsap, 2006; McArdle, 1997). Even with multiple methods for evaluating person-level information, it is unusual for researchers to report any examination of the person level fit information. Researchers may be hesitant to use person level fit indices because there are very few studies that evaluate how effective these person level fit indices are at identifying aberrant observations, or what criteria to use with the indices. In order to better understand which approaches for evaluating person level information will perform best for LGCMs, this research uses simulation studies to examine the application of several person level fit indices to the detection of three types of aberrant observations including: extreme trajectory aberrance, extreme variability aberrance, and functional form aberrance. Results indicate that examining factor score estimates directly can help to identify extreme trajectory aberrance, while approaches examining factor score residuals or examining a person log-likelihood are better at identifying extreme variability aberrance. The performance of these approaches improved with more observation times and higher communality. All of the factor score estimate approaches were able to identify functional form aberrance, as long as there were a sufficient number of observation times and either higher communality or a greater difference between the functional forms of interest.

The population values for the covariance matrix and mean vector for the latent trajectory
parameters for the normal population come from McArdle and Bell (2000). The parameter estimates were
obtained using a subset of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY; Baker, Keck,
Mott, & Quinlan, 1993; Chase-Lansdale, Mott, Brooks-Gunn, & Phillips, 1991). The data include 233
children who participated in the NLSY in 1986 when the children were ages 6 to 8. The data were
selected because this subset of children had measures of their reading ability 4 times over 8 years.
McArdle and Bell provide more information on how the reading scores were calculated. This study used
the linear LGCM parameter estimates presented in Table 5.4 on page 83 of McArdle and Bell (2000)

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As the definition of what is considered a family changes in our society, the family unit itself continues to undergo changes. These changes can sometimes lead to decreased stability within the family unit. This study focused on how this instability impacts adolescents who are brought up in unstable families, specifically within the context of their behavioral outcomes. Variables surrounding family stability as well as several indicators of maladaptive behavioral outcomes were used to measure this concept. This study used a longitudinal, non-experimental approach, guided by a comprehensive literature review and the theoretical application to Skinner's theory of applied behavior.

Bibliography Citation

Baldridge, Stephen N. The Impact of Familial Stability on Adolescent Behavioral Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Texas at Arlington, May 2010..

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The public concern that immigrant families might be using a disproportionate share of social benefits and transmitting some form of public dependency to their children, combined with the rising levels of immigrants entering the country, fueled the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, which limited public assistance to many immigrant families. This dissertation uses the Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to explore the association between exposure to welfare and young adult outcomes of educational attainment and labor force participation with a focus on parental nativity status as well as broad country of origin group.

A group-level analysis is performed using linear probability models on aggregate national-origin groups to ascertain whether the welfare use of an immigrant group affects the average level of high school graduation, college enrollment, and welfare participation of the second generation, net of immigrant groups education level. An additional analysis assesses the relationship between prior parental welfare legacy and subsequent outcomes at the micro-level of the individual using binary and multinomial logit models.

Results from the CPS analysis provide no evidence of an intergenerational correlation in welfare receipt across immigrant generations, but do provide descriptive evidence of a positive correlation between immigrant first generation welfare receipt and the young adult second generation educational attainment. The NLSY97 analysis shows a persistent negative association between welfare legacy and high school graduation; a negative association that is most pronounced for children of natives. Results of this study also show the largest effect of welfare receipt among the most disadvantaged group, the young adult children of immigrants from Mexican and Central American countries. The main finding of this study suggests that the negative impacts of welfare receipt might be lessened and in some cases reversed among the young adults from immigrant families. Such findings challenge the common notion that immigrant families use welfare as a crutch across generations and raise serious concern about U.S. immigration and welfare policies.

Bibliography Citation

Balistreri, Kelly Stamper. Welfare and the Children of Immigrants: Transmission of Dependence or Investment in the Future? Ph.D. Dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2006. DAI-A 67/04, Oct 2006..

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This study tested the theory of a relationship between self-esteem and extrinsic career success, using data taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79ch). Answers were sought as to whether a relationship exists between self-esteem and extrinsic career success, and whether self-esteem in combination with job satisfaction also exhibited a relationship with extrinsic career success. Simple regressions were run for single variable tests, and multiple regressions for multivariate tests. Self-esteem in simple regressions did reliably impact extrinsic career success, whereas job satisfaction as a coefficient failed to do so. Education was found instead to be far more impactful. Additional research to identify further predictors of this success from similar longitudinal data would be advantageous for predicting career path.

Bibliography Citation

Barclay, Justin P. Examining the Relationship Between Self-Esteem and Extrinsic Career Success Among NLSY79 Young Adult Respondents. Ph.D. Dissertation, Argosy University/Phoenix College of Business, April 2011.

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This dissertation adds to the alcohol and labor literature by investigating both the potential mechanisms outlined above along with their resulting policy implications. This work also attempts to address gaps in our knowledge of the relationship between at-risk and labor market outcomes, by focusing on a U.S. representative sample of mid-career men and women, adding controls for potentially important confounders (e.g. time preference and risk aversion) not addressed in past work, and testing the sensitivity of the association of at-risk drinking with labor market outcomes to endogeneity. In addition, this dissertation also defines at-risk drinking according the NIAAA's Clinician's Guide to improve translation of study findings for policymakers and clinicians. The labor market outcomes examined include wage rates, work hours, total earnings, occupational attributes (i.e., physical exposure, job autonomy, and social engagement), receipt of a variety of fringe benefits, and total hourly compensation (i.e. wage rate plus the hourly value of the benefits received).

Bibliography Citation

Barnes, Andrew James. From Happy Hour to Rush Hour: Effects of At-Risk Drinking on Labor Market Outcomes Among Mid-Career Men and Women. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011.

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This feminist research focuses on the issues of poverty and sexism instead of the notion of welfare dependency. Two research questions were addressed: (1) How are long-term AFDC recipients connected to the labor force? (2) What predicts stable exits for long-term AFDC recipients? Using NLSY data, results indicated that long-term recipients' connections to the paid labor force were similar to all recipients. However, long-term recipients don't look different in terms of human capital characteristics and poverty status compared to their short-term counterparts. Long-term recipients who reported working substantial hours looked more like those who reported working limited or no hours. However, they were more likely to be non-Hispanic/non-Black, to have been married, and to have older children. An event history analysis concerning stable exit predictors revealed that recipients who received job training and had a child under age two were likely to achieve stable exits but not escape poverty.

Bibliography Citation

Bartle, Elizabeth E. Long-term Use of AFDC: Women and Poverty. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Kansas, 1997.

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This dissertation addresses the issue of optimal school entry age. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the US Census, this study examines the effect of delaying kindergarten entry on cognitive test scores, educational attainment and maternal labor supply.

The first essay estimates the effect of a one year delay in entering kindergarten on academic performance. To deal with the endogeneity of school entrance age, we exploit the variation in month of birth and state kindergarten entrance age laws. The results suggest that older entrants have higher test scores compared to younger entrants in the same grade and are less likely to repeat grades. However conditional on age, older entrants perform worse because they have completed less schooling.
scores, educational attainment and maternal labor supply.

The second essay uses Two Sample Instrumental Variables (TSIV) to estimate the effect of delayed school entry on educational attainment. We show that previous studies that have used instrumental variables to deal with the endogeneity of school entry age are severely biased. In addition, we propose a structural model of optimal kindergarten entry age and use indirect inference simulation methods to estimate the parameters of the model. Further, we use our simulated data to obtain true Local Average Treatment Effect estimates of the effect of school entry age on educational attainment, scores, educational attainment and maternal labor supply.

The third chapter evaluates the effect of delaying kindergarten entry on long run maternal labor supply. I use an exogenous source of variation in maternal net earning opportunities, generated through school entrance age of children, to study intertemporal labor supply behavior. The estimates suggest that delayed school enrollment has long run implications for maternal labor supply. Results point towards significant intertemporal substitution in labor supply. In particular, rough
calculations yield an uncompensated wage elasticity of 0.76, wealth elasticity of -0.37 and an intertemporal elasticity of substitution equal to 1.1.

Power and Mobilization: The Problem of All-Volunteer Force Enlistment
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, 2017
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Military Enlistment; Military Recruitment; Military Service

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Abolishing the draft and moving to an All-Volunteer Force appears to some scholars including Levy (2014) to be a relinquishment of state power to the labor market for mobilizing recruits. This dissertation argues that state officials did not relinquish power over military recruitment after conscription ended. Transitioning from conscription to the All-Volunteer Force created a collective action problem for state officials: free-riding would be more rational than enlisting, since non-enlistees would receive the same national security benefits as enlistees without having to fight for them. State officials needed to leverage new, non-coercive forms of power to overcome this collective action problem and mobilize an All-Volunteer Force. These new mechanisms of power included offering a set of unparalleled selective incentives for enlistment, using expansive and highly targeted advertising campaigns to align recruitment messages with vulnerable groups, and strategically placing military recruiters in neighborhoods that were disproportionately structurally vulnerable. State officials also capitalized on welfare state retrenchment. In light of the decreasing provision of welfare benefits, incentives offered for military participation were considerable, especially for those most in need. This dissertation theorizes a relationship between mechanisms of state power and more vulnerable groups enlisting for military service. To test components of this relationship, this dissertation draws on data from nationally representative data sets (e.g., PSID, NLSY, YATS, ACS, and CPS) and self-collected data (recruitment office locations and military advertisements), and analyzes the results with mixed methods. Notable findings include significant, positive relationships between increased structural vulnerability and military recruitment office locations, and increased biographical vulnerability and enlistments. A concluding study of intergenerational mobility for veterans and non-veterans finds improved income mobility for veterans over non-veterans working 40 hours per week or less, and for those in the lowest income quintile. By offering increased life chances to those who were most vulnerable, the military performed a social welfare function. In so doing, state officials continued to put those who were most vulnerable in the position of defending the nation.

Bibliography Citation

Barwis, Peter J. Power and Mobilization: The Problem of All-Volunteer Force Enlistment. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, 2017.

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Chapter 2 examines worker mobility, and empirically tests whether all firms learn about workers' abilities at the same rate (symmetric learning) or whether current employers accumulate and use private information about their workers (asymmetric learning). The employer learning model allows for both public and private learning, and thus, nests symmetric learning as a special case. The model predicts that conditional on employees' easily observable reference groups, workers are adversely selected into job switches and layoffs on the basis of difficult to observe characteristics, such as intellectual ability. Inversely, conditional on ability, the model predicts that as the mean ability of a worker's reference group increases, the likelihood of job separation increases. Under asymmetric private learning, these effects should become more pronounced over the length of continuous working spells. The same effects should diminish with experience, in the presence of public learning. In keeping with earlier examinations of employer learning hypotheses, this study examines evidence from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, using AFQT as the difficult to observe measure of ability. Conditional on AFQT score, workers with higher education from more selective institutions are are positively selected into job switches and moves from employment to unemployment during recessions. The dynamics of these effects largely play out as predicted. While this works presents evidence adverse selection on the basis of AFQT, for job-to-unemployment transitions, the same is not true for job-to-job moves. The dynamic effects for AFQT are likewise inconsistent. Accordingly, the evidence largely rejects symmetric learning in favor asymmetric learning.

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Job search models typically describe jobs solely in terms of wages, but empirical evidence suggests non-wage characteristics are an important determinant of job choice. For instance, workers in the NLSY79 report moving from a higher paying job to a lower paying job in 33% of voluntary job-to-job transitions. I estimate an equilibrium-based job search model that accounts for hiring wages, on-the-job wage growth, non-wage job characteristics and measurement error in wages. This model provides the first known estimate of the cumulative importance of all non-wage characteristics in job market decisions. I find that non-wage characteristics are a more important determinant of job choices than hiring wages.

I use the model and estimated parameters to measure how workers value the better non-wage characteristics and on-the-job wage growth potential that result when unemployment insurance enables them to search longer. Accounting for these previously unmeasured benefits roughly triples my estimate of the program's value to workers. These results suggest an important role for non-wage characteristics in other applications throughout labor economics.

Bibliography Citation

Becker, Daniel Stephen. Non-Wage Characteristics and the Case of the Missing Margin. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Virginia, 2009..

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Parent's occupational and educational achievements have long affected Americans' own achievements. How that happens depends in part on parent-child involvement and has become more complicated over the past thirty to forty years due to the increasing prevalence of diverse family forms. The heyday of family stability---roughly 1945-1975---coincided with the development of family-based social mobility and stratification research. Researchers took advantage of stability to simplify their measures of family background, frequently wholly summarizing children's social class in a single ranking or category based on the father's occupation. Today's complexity of family forms and the growing importance of mothers' occupations to family social class position render this simplification obsolete---over fifty percent of Americans born as early as 1940 say that their mother, too, worked outside the home. This dissertation documents the distortions that occur when researchers ignore these complexities and begins the process of modernizing family stratification research. I do so by bringing in the resources of both mothers and fathers---custodial and non custodial---in defining childhood social class.

My dissertation research findings confirm that stratification research stands on a shaky foundation in ignoring family complexity. I show that models of intergenerational mobility which include family-level measures of class or educational background do a much better job of representing the mobility patterns in the data than conventional models do. Moreover, the choice of family background measure affects research conclusions. For example, I show that the apparent leveling of a long term trend toward greater equality in social class outcomes among recent male birth cohorts is actually due to the increasing but unmeasured effect of mothers' class resources on sons' outcomes. Rather than leveling off, inequality has increased noticeably compared to older cohorts. I also show that the lower predicted educational attainment of children raised in single parent families results from a comparatively weak relationship between absent parents' educational resources and children's educational success. This weak relationship exists only when parent-child involvement is low---when children spend sufficient time with absent parents, their achievement levels are close to those of young people who live full time with both parents.

Bibliography Citation

Beller, Emily Ann. Families and Mobility: A Re-Conceptualization of the Social Class of Children. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Berkeley, 2006.

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My thesis consists of three chapters that focus on investments in human capital by individuals.

The first chapter focuses on the skill accumulation of workers who have completed their formal education. Skills are acquired through work experience in the learning-by-doing (LBD) model. This model predicts that once hours of work are accounted for, there should be no systematic variation in wage growth. I use this prediction to test the LBD model by estimating, conditional on hours worked, the correlation between wage growth and variables affecting the incentives to accumulate skills. This correlation is found statistically significant and suggests a rejection of the LBD model for a sample of male and female workers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979.

The second chapter is co-authored with Lance Lochner. We use the NLSY 1979 and NLSY 1997 to estimate the effects of family income on educational attainment in the early 1980s and early 2000s. The effects of family income on college attendance increase substantially over this period. We develop an educational choice model that incorporates both borrowing constraints and a "consumption value" of schooling. The model cannot explain the rising effects of family income on college attendance in response to rising costs and returns to college without appealing to borrowing constraints.

The third chapter is co-authored with Marc Frenette and Lance Lochner. We conduct a parallel empirical analysis of the effects of parental income on post-secondary (PS) education attendance for recent high school cohorts in both the U.S. and Canada using data from the NLSY 1997 and Youth in Transition Survey. We estimate smaller post-secondary education attendance gaps by parental income in Canada relative to the U.S., even after controlling for family background and adolescent cognitive achievement. We develop an intergenerational schooling choice model that sheds light on the role of potentially import
ant determinants of the family income - post-secondary education attendance gap. We document Canada - U.S. differences in financial returns to PS schooling, tuition policy, and financial aid, discussing the extent to which these differences contribute to the stronger family income - attendance relationship in the U.S.

Bibliography Citation

Belley, Philippe. Human Capital Investments of Workers and the Schooling Decision of Young Adults. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of West Ontario (Canada), 2011.

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This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) to evaluate race-gender differences in workplace injuries across time (1988-1998). I applied two labor market theories to explain race and gender differences in work injuries: structural devaluation theory and individual human capital theory. Both structural devaluation and individual human capital variables contributed to explaining some of the race and gender differences in risk trajectories. Regardless of individual race and gender, occupational racial-ethnic minority concentrations increase the risk of injury, supporting structural devaluation theory. Human capital theory also contributed to the models, and education was a strong buffer against occupational injuries. There was evidence of differentiated declines in risk across the 1990s by race and gender.

Six subgroups of workers from a random sample of youth who entered the labor market in 1979 were studied: white women, black women, Hispanic women, white men, black men, and Hispanic men. Using an intersectionality framework, I establish that occupational injuries differ by race-gender. Race-gender differences in the initial odds of injury, time trajectories, and relationships between substantive predictors support an intersectionality framework. Differences in injury risk across time were documented and modeled using a Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling framework. Non-Hispanic white men began the study with the greatest risk of injury, while minority men had the lowest risk of injury. Across the 1990's differences between race-gender subgroups diminished. Non-Hispanic whites and black women have the greatest risk of injury in later waves.

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Mortality modeling has come a long way since the demographer Benjamin Gompertz (1779-1865). We address populations where mortality is structured by the joint effects of age and state and individuals can change state at each age. Dynamic states are the most complex and interesting states to consider and we focus on three categories of states: being married or unmarried, being below or above a particular income threshold, or being in one of four income states. We examine how the transience of our particular states at each age drives the cohort dynamics such as the demographic structure and lifespan inequalities within the cohort.

In each chapter we used two U.S. nationally representative data-sets (the Health and Retirement Survey RAND data-set, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) to statistically estimate the probabilities of survival and transitions between states at each age with regression analysis. These probabilities were incorporated into discrete age and discrete state matrices. We examine age-specific state structure, the average remaining life expectancy, its variance, cohort simulations, dynamic heterogeneity and individual trajectories.

Bibliography Citation

Bernstein, Shayna. Age by Stage Modeling of Dynamic Heterogeneity. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Biology, University of Miami, 2017.

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Are immigrants crime prone? In America, this question has been posed since the turn of the 20th century and more than 100 years of research has shown that immigration is not linked to increasing crime rates. Nevertheless, as was true more than a century ago, the myth of the criminal immigrant continues to permeate public debate. In part this continued focus on immigrants as crime prone is the result of significant methodological and theoretical gaps in the extant literature. Five key limitations are identified and addressed in this research including: (1) a general reliance on aggregate level analyses, (2) the treatment of immigrants as a homogeneous entity, (3) a general dependence on official data, (4) the utilization of cross-sectional analyses, and (5) nominal theoretical attention.

Two broad questions motivate this research. First, how do the patterns of offending over the life course differ across immigrant and native-born groups? Second, what factors explain variation in offending over time for immigrants and does the influence of these predictors vary across immigrant and native-born individuals? These questions are examined using two separate datasets capturing information on immigration and crime during two distinct waves of immigration in the United States. Specifically, I use the Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency data and subsequent follow-ups to capture early 20th century immigration and crime, while contemporary data come from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997.

Three particularly salient conclusions are drawn from this research. First, patterns of offending (i.e., prevalence, frequency, persistence and desistance) are remarkably similar for native-born and immigrant individuals. Second, although differences are observed when examining predictors of offending for native-born and immigrant individuals, they tend to be differences in degree rather than kind. That is, immigrants and native-born individuals are influe
nced similarly by family, peer, and school factors. Finally, these findings are robust and held when taking into account socio-historical context, immigrant generation, immigration nationality group, and crime type. In sum, based on the evidence from this research, the simple answer to the question of whether immigrants are crime prone is no.

Bibliography Citation

Bersani, Bianca Elizabeth. Are Immigrants Crime Prone? A Multifaceted Investigation of the Relationship Between Immigration and Crime in Two Eras. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland - College Park, August 2010.

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As previous research indicated that foster youth struggle in the primary domains of emerging adulthood (i.e., the school to work transition; the move to independent housing; formation of adult relationships; and parenthood), there is growing concern that foster youth need additional assistance during this period. Though these studies are robust in pinpointing difficulties for foster youth, they provide limited insight into the possible causes. Given that foster youth share many characteristics with other youth who struggle during this period, it is unclear whether foster care, existing risk factors, or a combination of the two creates challenges for foster youth. The primary objective of this dissertation was to examine the relationship between these factors and the transition to adulthood for foster youth.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this dissertation compared the transition outcomes of foster and non-foster care youth. Youth were matched using propensity score methodology, which models the likelihood to be in foster care based on a set of pre-existing characteristics, and traditional matching methods based on demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, race, age, parent's education, income, and having a stepparent). Bivariate and multivariate analysis revealed that foster youth fared worse than unmatched youth in all transition domains. However, outcomes were similar for foster youth and youth matched using propensity scoring in all domains except housing. This suggests that the pre-existing characteristics that put youth at risk for foster care may contribute to their difficulties in emerging adulthood rather than the experience of foster care itself. Findings using the traditionally matched samples showed some group differences suggesting that a larger set of attributes than those matched on contribute to foster youth difficulties. Analyses examining interaction effects between foster care and characteristics associated with negative transition outcomes did not identify any particularly vulnerable subgroups of foster youth. These findings are a substantive departure from past research, which suggested that foster youth were falling behind youth in the general population and comparison youth. Findings from this dissertation are used to provide policy and practice recommendations for foster youth and other vulnerable youth.

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We first examine US funding for and results of higher education in the context of eleven countries in Western Europe. We study differences in effect of population size, economy, and spending on new enrollment. We find GDP is a better predictor of enrollment changes than spending on higher education or population. We use the relationship between GDP and enrollment as a mechanism for studying the differences in spending effectiveness between countries. We find that European reforms, such as increased school autonomy and student loans/grants, cause no differences in enrollment. Enrollment is higher in countries where proportionately more educational funding comes from private sources.

We further focus on the US higher education market. Using a two-stage least squares model, we build a macroeconomic model of supply and demand for US higher education as measured by enrollment. We find that college education benefits (e.g. relative earnings and employment levels), credit factors (e.g. student loan amounts and household debt), and financial aid shift demand. Higher tuition prices increase appeal of higher education but credit constraints put a barrier on demand growth. Tuition prices and debt levels are correlated, suggesting that students respond to higher tuition prices by borrowing. School's operating costs, government aid, and tuition and non-tuition revenue drive supply. Schools can use tuition prices to signal quality, and relative demand side price in-elasticity allows them to raise prices.

Finally, we narrow in on individuals. We compare post-college income across differing groups of student ability, school quality, and major choice. We condition on intrinsic student ability based on the quality of the top school to which a student was admitted. We find that attendance at an elite institution increases post-college income. For students not admitted to an elite school, income is primarily driven by student ability and major choice. Students majoring in
engineering and business earn higher salaries than students focusing on humanities and arts even after adjusting for ability. School quality plays a key role in the college attendance and school choice decisions, even though we do not find a significant effect of these decisions on post-college earnings in most cases.

Bibliography Citation

Best, Katharina. Three Studies on the Value and Risk of Higher Education. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, October 2013.

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My research emphasizes the role of interrelated preferences in determining economic choices within a household. In this regard, I study both intergenerational interactions (between parents and children) and intragenerational interactions (between spouses). These linkages have important implications on individual economic behavior such as savings, labor supply, investment in human capital, and bequests which in turn affects aggregate savings and growth. Standard altruism models developed by Barro and Becker are based on an important assumption that parents and children have homogeneous discount factors, which precludes any role parents can play in influencing their child's time preferences. However, there is empirical evidence that parents attempt to shape their children's attitudes. The first essay of my dissertation, "Tough Love and Intergenerational Altruism" (based on this I also have a joint work with Masao Ogaki), proposes a framework to study the role of parents in shaping children's time preferences. The tough love altruism model modifies the standard altruism model in two ways. First, the child's discount factor is endogenously determined so that low consumption at young ages leads to a higher discount factor later in her life. Second, the parent evaluates the child's lifetime utility with a constant high discount factor. In contrast to the predictions of the standard model that transfers are independent of exogenous changes in the child's discount factor, the tough love altruism model predicts that transfers from the parent will fall when the child's discount factor falls. Thus, our model is more consistent with empirical evidence on parental punishments than the standard altruism model.

The second essay, "Adolescent Substance Use and Intergenerational Transfers: Evidence from Micro Data," provides empirical evidence for the use of pecuniary incentives by the parent to influence child behavior. Using the first seven waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 (NLSY97), I measure the effect of child alcohol consumption on parental transfers. Owing to the plausible endogeneity of the child's alcohol use in the regression equation of transfers she receives from parents, I estimate this relationship using an instrumental variable which utilizes variation in the price of alcoholic beverages over time and across states as a source of exogenous variation. The main finding of the paper is that after accounting for the possible endogeneity of substance use, the incidence of alcohol consumption among youths significantly reduces the amount of parental transfers they receive. Given the robust evidence for a negative correlation between youth substance use and their discount factor in the economics and psychology literature, this result provides an empirical basis for the tough love model of intergenerational altruism. The existing literature on joint retirement suggests that married couples tend to coordinate their retirement decisions which seem to be largely explained by the complementarity in their preferences for leisure. However, the recent trend toward increased labor force participation of older married women may make synchronization of retirement decisions more difficult as more recent cohorts of women become more strongly attached to the labor force and build their own careers, a fact that has been overlooked in the literature.

My third essay, "Cross-Cohort Differences in Joint Retirement: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study," uses the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data from 1992 through 2006 to document that the likelihood of a married couple jointly exiting the labor force (given that both were employed in the previous period) decreases across successive birth cohorts of wives. I then estimate a discrete choice multinomial model of labor force transition for married couples and find that, while economic factors have substantial power in explaining variation across married couples in retirement behavior, trends across cohorts in these factors do not contribute significantly towards explaining the observed cohort trend in joint retirement. This result suggests that non-economic factors, such as changes in social norms and attitudes towards work, are likely to be more important explanations for this observed trend. From a policy perspective, an implication of this finding is that the bias in the estimated effect of a policy aimed at influencing older workers' labor force behavior (caused by ignoring potential interactions in retirement decisions of spouses) can be mitigated if recent cohorts are less likely to retire together.

Bibliography Citation

Bhatt, Vipul. Three Essays on the Economics of Household Decision Making. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2010.

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My dissertation consists of three essays on children's skill acquisition and academic achievement. In all the essays, I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the supplemental Child Survey (NLSY-CHILD). In the first essay, I ask whether family structure causally affects the cognitive test scores and behavioral problems of children. I use multiple observations on each child to estimate a first-difference model and net out the effect of child- and parent-specific time-invariant unobservable factors that are correlated with both the test scores and family structure. I find no improvement in mathematics and reading test scores when mother (re)marries. There is also no decrease in these test scores when a child moved from a two biological parent to a single mother household. However, the results for the behavioral problems suggest that there might be some benefit, in terms of lower behavioral problems, of having a father in the household. In the second essay, I analyze whether delaying entry into kindergarten by an academic year helps to improve the academic performance of the delayed entrants. Every year a large number of parents hold their children out of kindergarten for an academic year although they meet the state kindergarten entry cut-offs (popularly known as "red-shirting"). I use a propensity score matching estimation (PSM) technique to estimate the effect of delaying entry into kindergarten for the delayed entrants by comparing test scores of "matched" delayed and non-delayed entrants. I find that delaying entry into kindergarten has a small but statistically significant negative effect on the reading and mathematics test scores of delayed entrants. In the third essay, I ask whether repeating a grade improves the performance of repeaters in mathematics and reading tests. I use a variant of PSM, where PSM is combined with a difference-in-difference estimator, to estimate the effect of repeating a grade for the repeaters. I find that repeating a grade actually lowers the performance on reading and mathematics tests for the repeaters, compared with how they would have performed if they had not repeated a grade.

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Adolescents and young adults continue to have the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections (STI) in the United States, and blacks bear a disproportionate burden. While most sexual risk research has focused on understanding individual-level risk factors and intervening on individual behaviors, these individual-level differences do not completely explain the racial disparities in sexual risk. Determining the underlying causes of racial disparities in sexually transmitted infections is important to reduce the burden overall and eliminate inequities in health. Residential racial segregation results in very different contexts for individuals, largely stratified by race, and may be an important determinant of sexual risk. This dissertation examined whether residential racial segregation - as measured using indices obtained from the US Census Bureau - is associated with sexually transmitted infections and sexual risk behaviors, and whether it could help explain the racial disparities in these health outcomes.

In the first study, which was ecologic in nature, using data on reported cases of gonorrhea provided by special request from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I demonstrated that certain dimensions of segregation were associated with rates of gonorrhea among blacks in the United States.

In an attempt to determine whether segregation impacted sexual risk by impacting sexual risk behaviors, the remainder of the dissertation examined whether segregation could help explain black-white differences in sexual risk behaviors in a population-based, 11-year prospective study of adolescents in the United States (NLSY97). Specifically, for the second study, we used 2-level hierarchical survival analysis to simultaneously examine whether MSA-level residential racial segregation is associated with age at sexual initiation, after accounting for other area-level covariates, such as area socioeconomic position, and individual-level covariates,
such as gender and family income. We determined that segregation was not associated with early age at sexual initiation overall but that it did help to explain the racial disparity in this outcome. In more segregated areas, blacks were at higher risk than whites, whereas no racial disparity existed in less segregated areas.

In the third study, we performed 3-level hierarchical linear regression to examine whether residential racial segregation was associated with a sexual risk index over 11 years of follow up. In this study, we did not find any evidence that segregation was associated with the sex risk index or that it modified the trajectory of the race-sex risk association.

Does Perception of School Safety Bolster the Effects of Family and School Social Capital?: An Examination of Educational Attainment, Running Away from Home and Violence
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University, 2017
Cohort(s):
NLSY97
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Bullying/Victimization; Educational Attainment; Runaways; School Characteristics/Rating/Safety; Social Capital

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While past research shows that unsafe schools are linked to students' poor academic performance and behavioral problems, little work examines the effect of students' perceptions of schools' safety on educational attainment, delinquency and crime. Prior research suggests that capital investments from both families and schools are important for youths' socialization and development. Yet, current research neglects to test if two important aspects of schools--students' perceptions of schools' safety and experiences with victimization--hinder the effectiveness of family and school capital on adolescent and young adult outcomes. Therefore, I fill existing gaps by expanding work that addresses the effects of both family and school capital on three outcomes: (1) educational attainment, (2) running away from home, and (3) violence. Using ecological systems theory and perspectives on investments in children and adolescents, I examine the influence of perception of school safety and family financial, human and social capital and school social capital predicting educational attainment at three time-points: 2001, 2005, and 2011. I find that students who perceived their schools as unsafe obtained fewer years of education than students who perceived their schools as safe environments. I also find students' perceptions of schools as safe bolsters the effect of family financial and human capital and school social capital in promoting more years of completed education. Following this, I also test how perception of school safety and experiences with bully victimization moderate the effects of family and school resources predicting running away from home and violence. I find that the bonds between youths and their families and youths and their schools are important agents of social control. However, my findings suggests that individuals' perceptions of their schools as unsafe and negative peer experiences in the form of bully victimization may influence the process through which the bonds to conventional institutions help prevent problem behaviors. This suggests that a theoretical approach that considers investments in youths from multiple contexts and youths' perceptions and experiences may be better suited for predicting adolescent and young adult educational and behavioral outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Bixby, Monica Sue. Does Perception of School Safety Bolster the Effects of Family and School Social Capital?: An Examination of Educational Attainment, Running Away from Home and Violence. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University, 2017.

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Women are a significant presence in today's workforce; however, few rise to the top management ranks. Therefore, there is a critical need to better understand the factors that facilitate their success. This study examined several variables that may contribute to women's objective (income, span of control, promotions) and subjective (self-reported satisfaction) success. Predictive variables include human capital (training, experience), individual (perception of promotability, motivation for training), organizational (supervisor gender, percentage of male subordinates) and power (extent of supervisory authority) factors. Participants were members of the National Longitudinal Surveys Young Women cohort, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data were analyzed through simultaneous multiple regression analysis, and the results indicated that education was significantly related to income for all women. For women in management positions, their degree of supervisory power was also predictive of higher income, yet negatively associated with job satisfaction. Further, their span of control was positively influenced by the amount of time they spent in on-the-job training. The implications for women's career advancement, study limitations, and future research possibilities are also discussed.

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Chapter two analyzes how the way we measure achievement affects estimates of the black-white test gap among young children. Although both economists and psychometricians typically treat test scores as interval scales, they are reported using ordinal scales. We use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey to examine the effect of order-preserving scale transformations on the evolution of the black-white reading test score gap from kindergarten entry through third grade. Plausible transformations reverse the growth of the gap in the CNLSY and greatly reduce it in the ECLS-K during the early school years. All growth from entry through first grade and a nontrivial proportion from first to third grade probably reflects scaling decisions.

To address the measurement problems demonstrated in chapter two, in chapter three we relate test scores to adult outcomes. Using data from the CNLSY, we perform order-preserving scale transformations on reading and math test scores to maximize their ability to predict completed education. We find that the black-white achievement gap grows during the early years of education when measured in terms of test scores' economic value. Classical measurement error is ins
ufficient to explain the growth in the gap.

Social and Emotional Development of Children 0 to 36 Months in Poverty
Ph. D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, University of Tennessee - Knoxville, 2005.
Also: http://etd.utk.edu/2005/BopkovaValentina.pdf
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Child Development; Children, Poverty; Family Characteristics; Family Income; Home Environment; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Parenting Skills/Styles; Poverty; Temperament

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The study examined the effects of poverty on young children's social and emotional development through the effects poverty has on parenting. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) was the chosen data set. Total of 148 children and their parents (primarily mothers) took part in the study, at two survey time points 1998 and 2000. The study was a reanalysis of survey data and not an original survey data collection. There were two types of regression analyses performed ("snap-shot" and "motion-picture"). First each of the four crafted hypotheses was tested within one time frame, and then year 1998 was used as a baseline to predict change in 2000 outcome. Some effects of poverty on child's social and emotional development were found when hypotheses were tested for each year separately. These effects are present even after controlling for a range of individual and family characteristics that affect child development, including those that are likely to be correlated with parenting. However the significance of that effect in most cases went away when 1998 year was used as a baseline to predict change in score for 2000. This study drew a much clearer picture on drawing conclusions based on results from "snap-shot" analyses as compared to "motion-picture" analyses.

Bibliography Citation

Bopkova, Valentina. Social and Emotional Development of Children 0 to 36 Months in Poverty. Ph. D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, University of Tennessee - Knoxville, 2005..

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My final essay evaluates how access to medical care can impact lifestyle choices. I evaluate if there is an ex ante moral hazard effect in health insurance markets. Ex ante moral hazard occurs when an individual takes on more risk knowing they will not bear the full cost of the consequences. In the case of health insurance, this could mean taking on unhealthful eating habits knowing that if these habits lead to illness the cost of care will be covered by insurance. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Youth Survey 1997, I find evidence of an ex ante moral hazard effect in BMI, binge drinking, and smoking, suggesting that people take on less healthful behaviors, holding all else constant, when they have health insurance. The existence of ex ante moral hazard suggests that insurance companies can seek efficiency gains by finding ways to structure policies that diminish this moral hazard effect.

Bibliography Citation

Botkins, Elizabeth Robison. Three Essays on the Economics of Food and Health Behavior. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics, The Ohio State University, 2017.

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The third chapter presents a model of unemployment duration in which individuals exit the unemployment spell when their perceived monetary and non-monetary losses due to unemployment are greater than a threshold level. The threshold combines both the individuals' perceived wage offer distribution and their self-imposed limits on the amount of losses they are willing to sustain during the spell. The model is applied to data from the NLSY79. The empirical application finds that for some groups of individuals, the sunk cost effect weakens over time, while for others, it does not. For some groups, differences in transition rates are driven by differences in initial net wealth, while for others, by differences in sensitivity to losses.

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In this dissertation, I use educational performance outcomes to assess the sociological relevance of two visible physical characteristics--skin color and body fat--addressing challenges of accurate measurement and of variation in the salience of these characteristics across cohorts. I argue that the visible body is itself a social fact, and that by omitting physical variation from quantitative analysis of inequality, social scientists render invisible systems of inequality that persist within categories such as sex and race, seeing only disparities between them. Through three studies using large national datasets, I demonstrate such within-sex and within-race variation in educational attainment and achievement by phenotype, and offer suggestions for better engaging the visible body in sociological research on inequality.

Early Careers and Life Course Transitions for Three Cohorts of Young Adults
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Washington, 2017
Cohort(s):
NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Career Patterns; Family Formation; Life Course; Marriage; Mobility, Labor Market; Transition, Adulthood

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Using a mixed-method approach and data from two cohorts of young adults, I investigate how employment structures and economic contexts influence individuals' movement through the labor market and how their labor market experiences are linked to other spheres of life, chiefly marriage and parenthood. In Chapter 2, I evaluate how employment transitions affect wage level and wage growth. Contrary to expectations, I find that voluntary mobility in the early career period has not increased and, in fact, workers in the 1980s have more employers in their early careers than workers in the 2000s. While moving from job-to-job increases wages for workers in both the 1980s and 2000s, both the prevalence and negative consequences of involuntary mobility is lower for workers in the 2000s. These findings suggest that there is less scarring from non-voluntary mobility for contemporary young adults and that voluntary, strategic mobility can be used to build financially rewarding careers. In Chapter 3, I compare sequences of employment, school, marriage and parenthood for two cohorts of young adults. I find that there has been a substantial increase in the concentration of young adults in trajectories defined by education and employment suggesting that contemporary young adults are prioritizing attending college and establishing their careers over starting a family in their 20s. This finding is especially pronounced for women.

Bibliography Citation

Branstad, Jennifer. Early Careers and Life Course Transitions for Three Cohorts of Young Adults. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Washington, 2017.

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Criminologists frequently identify parenting as a significant influence in adolescents' decisions to conform to or deviate from normative expectations. Often, these scholars examine processes by which parental attachment, supervision, and coercion either inhibit or encourage adolescent delinquency. However, despite its prominence in scholarship on child development and its potential applicability to criminological theory, few criminologists have considered the part that autonomy-supportive parenting, or parenting practices that foster an adolescent's capacity for independent decision-making, might play in encouraging or inhibiting delinquent behavior. I propose specific hypotheses linking parental autonomy support to adolescent delinquency through theoretical mechanisms that are well-known to criminologists, including self-control, reactance, and peer processes. Multilevel regressions are then presented that model linkages between adolescents' reported exposure to early autonomy-supportive parenting (at ages 10-12) and their self-reported participation in common delinquency from ages 10 to 17, using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (C-NLSY79). Overall, the findings suggest that early autonomy-supportive parenting is related to adolescent delinquency; however, the nature of this relationship depends upon whether the type of autonomy-supportive parenting is behavioral, communicative, or psychological, and depends upon the stage of adolescence examined. Finally I conclude with a brief discussion of implications and limitations of the findings and directions for future research.

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The purpose of the current project is to present three empirical studies that illustrate the application of advanced latent class modeling techniques to research questions about gambling and substance use. The first empirical study used latent class analysis (LCA) and LCA with covariates to identify and predict types of college-student gamblers using data from a large northeastern university. Four types of gamblers were identified: non-gamblers, cards and lotto players, cards and games of skill players, and multi-game players. Significant predictors of gambling latent class membership included: gender, school year, living in off-campus housing, Greek membership, and past-year alcohol use. There were substantial gender differences in the probabilities of latent class membership and in the predictive effects of the covariates. The second empirical study used LCA to identify types of adolescent and young adult gamblers and used LCA for repeated measures to identify types of drinking trajectories using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Multivariable LCA was used to examine the relation between gambling and drinking by linking specific types of gambling to specific types of drinking trajectories. Gambling and drinking were shown to be highly related in general, and drinking frequency appeared to be more predictive of gambling than was drinking quantity. The third empirical study used latent transition analysis to identify types of adolescent smokers and types of drinkers, and to describe smoking and drinking development over time using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Multiprocess modeling was used to examine the relation between smoking and drinking by modeling the development of the two processes simultaneously. Three types of smokers and three types of drinkers were identified: non-smokers, light smokers, heavy smokers, non-drinkers, light drinkers, and heavy drinkers. The behavior of non-smokers, non-drinkers, heavy smokers, and heavy drinkers was relatively stable across time whereas the behavior of light smokers and light drinkers was variable. Multiprocesss modeling allowed the examination of the ways in which developmental transitions in drinking varied by smoking behavior.

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With data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the present study examines the effects of reading deficiency on delinquency through a series of OLS regression models. Data are drawn from the NLSY and reflect a sample size of 1,262. While the effects of IQ have been analyzed extensively in the literature, less attention has focused on the potential harmful effects of reading deficiency. This study builds on previous work, and includes several assessments of "academic" measures including IQ, reading comprehension, and digit span (sequencing ability) within the same model. Findings indicate that the addition of a variable measuring reading deficiency contributes to the prediction of delinquency. To further investigate the statistical relationships, interaction terms involving social, physical, human and cultural capital are tested. A path analysis is also conducted and reveals that reading deficiency could be also considered as a mediating variable between various exogenous factors and delinquency.

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Organizations that understand the impact of life events on organizational withdrawal behaviors (OWBs) are more aware of the ways to improve the management of employees undergoing stressful situations. Bhagat's life events model was evaluated for its ability to predict the effect of employees' life events on OWBs using a cohort of 7,565 participants from Round 24 of the ongoing National Longitudinal Survey of Youth archival data set. The literature review supported the need for organizations to gain an awareness of the probable effects of employees' life events on OWBs. Three life event variables (i.e., marital, family, and health status) were used as predictors to align with Hanisch and Bhagat's models to estimate the aggregate impact on the criterion variable of OWBs measured by current work status. Logistic regression analysis indicated that participants with better health and economic status had a greater likelihood of currently working than those with poorer health. The analysis did not show a significant association between marital status and current working status, between residence and current working status, or between having children and current working status. Additional analyses to determine whether crisis decisions and uncertainty navigation impact OWBs were not significant. These results will promote positive social change by helping organizations reduce costs through training that will help employees apply evidence-based interventions to manage the effects of negative life events on OWBs.

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Many individuals in the United States are incarcerated. The American incarceration rate and average sentence length have risen dramatically since the early 1980s. It is commonly hypothesized that mass incarceration has had various unintended consequences on individuals, households, and society at large. In this dissertation, I examine the effects of an individual's incarceration on several economic variables, including educational attainment, employment, and earnings. Over the course of three essays, I utilize the theoretical background and empirical methodology of contemporary labor economics to establish links between the experience of incarceration and generally negative subsequent outcomes. Each chapter draws on data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which allow me to examine the varying life courses and behaviors of a subsample of individuals that are incarcerated at some point during adulthood.

The first chapter of this dissertation investigates the long-term effects of parental incarceration on children. I utilize detailed intergenerational data and a variety of empirical methods to provide evidence that individuals who report resident parental incarceration during childhood experience depressed levels of educational attainment and earnings as an adult. These effects appear to vary by parent and child gender. The second chapter is concerned with estimating the returns to education attained after an incarceration spell. I analyze longitudinal individual histories of incarceration, education, employment, and earnings for a sample of former prisoners using regression and propensity score matching techniques. My results suggest that education has a positive effect on post-release labor supply and earnings, but this benefit is largely confined to the completion of four-year college degrees. The third and final chapter reevaluates the negative relationship between incarceration and earnings found in the current empirical lit
erature. I extend this literature with a battery of quantile regression models. My results clarify incarceration's effect on subsequent low earnings and suggest that the incarceration wage penalty is smaller in magnitude for low-skill, low-earnings employment. In total, this dissertation extends the current understanding of incarceration's effects on individuals and households, particularly with respect to performance on the market for labor. Each essay also provides some insight into the effectiveness of American criminal justice policy.

Bibliography Citation

Brown, Christian. Modern American Incarceration and Labor Economics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics and Finance, Middle Tennessee State University, 2013.

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Extensive empirical evidence documents racial/ethnic disparities in both wealth and health: compared to Whites, Hispanics and Blacks have considerably less wealth and worse health. However, it remains unclear why racial/ethnic inequalities in wealth and health emerge, and whether these inequalities decrease, remain stable, or increase with age. This dissertation aims to fill these gaps in the literature by drawing on life course perspectives and methods to investigate racial/ethnic differences in wealth and health trajectories (i.e., long-term patterns of intra-individual change and stability in wealth and health with age) and how social disadvantage contributes to racial/ethnic wealth and health disparities.

The first empirical chapter utilizes panel data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), a nationally representative survey, and growth curve models to examine racial/ethnic differences in wealth trajectories between ages 21 and 45. Findings reveal that relatively small wealth gaps between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics exist in their early 20s, but these initial inequalities are magnified with age. In the second substantive chapter, data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative, longitudinal dataset is used to examine whether racial/ethnic wealth gaps narrow, remain stable, or widen between during the years leading up to retirement (ages 51 and 73). Results show that Whites experience more rapid rates of wealth accumulation than their minority counterparts during middle and later life, resulting in accelerating wealth disparities with age, consistent with a process of cumulative disadvantage. At age 73, the average White household has a net worth of approximately $122,000, whereas both Hispanic and Black household have less than $5,000. Substantial racial/ethnic disparities in wealth trajectories persist after controlling for group differences in life course capital suggesting that other factors such as racial/ethnic differences in portfolio composition, financial transfers, and exposure to discrimination may contribute to wealth disparities. The third substantive chapter uses HRS data to examine racial/ethnic differences in health trajectories. Results indicate that there are dramatic racial/ethnic disparities in both the levels and rates of change in health. Overall, findings from this study show that racial/ethnic inequalities result in divergent aging experiences for Black, Hispanic, and White Americans.

Bibliography Citation

Brown, Tyson H. Divergent Pathways: Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Wealth And Health Trajectories. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008.

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In the second chapter of this dissertation, I present data on the marital behavior of actors in Hollywood and use it to study the causes of positive sorting on education in marriage. Actors in Hollywood do not meet their spouses in school, do not appear to earn wages that are correlated with their schooling, and are unlikely to choose their spouses on the basis of parental wealth. Despite these differences with the overall population, actors marry partners who are similar to themselves in terms of their educational background (the correlation of husband and wife years of schooling in Hollywood couples is 0.35, as opposed to 0.65 for the overall population). The proposed interpretation of this finding is that a nontrivial fraction of the observed sorting on education in US marriages is caused by factors other than sorting on earnings, sorting on parental wealth, and sorting that is induced by men and women meeting each other in school.

In the third chapter, I estimate and calibrate a marriage matching model to quantify the share of returns to education that is realized through marriage. In the model, more educated agents earn higher wages in the labor market, and are more productive in housework. Men and women who marry benefit from the presence of household public goods, complementarities in household production, and the division of labor between spouses. The predictions of the model are matched with NLSY data on sorting in marriage, and data on the allocation of time from the American Time Use Survey. Counterfactual analysis for men and women at age 40, suggests that better marital outcomes generate in the order of 35 percent of the return to education for women around middle age, and in the order of 10 percent of the corresponding return for men.

Bibliography Citation

Bruze, Gustaf Magnus. Essays on the Causes and Consequences of Marital Sorting on Schooling. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Chicago, 2009..

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This dissertation is composed of three essays using labor search models to explore the role of skill mismatch in the labor market. The first, "Skill Mismatch in Frictional Labor Markets", provides theory and evidence on pair-specific skill mismatch in the labor market, defined as the gap between an individual's skills and the requirements of her job. Employment data from the NLSY97 display some degree of positive sorting into occupations on the basis of cognitive skills, but skill mismatch is pervasive and costly. I develop and estimate a labor search model featuring heterogeneity in worker skills and firm skill requirements that demonstrates how search frictions induce voluntary mismatch acceptance. In addition, the model indicates that skill mismatch is countercyclical; as the labor market tightens, mismatch tolerance falls and wages rise for all workers. However, the elasticity of mismatch tolerance with respect to market tightness varies systematically across the skill space, leading to changes in the composition of employment over the business cycle.

While the model generates levels of mismatch broadly consistent with the data, the degree of positive sorting is underestimated for higher-skilled workers. The second chapter, "Targeted Search in Heterogeneous Labor Markets'", extends the theory of targeted search by introducing continuous skill heterogeneity among workers and firms in frictional labor markets. Workers are unable to fully direct their search, but instead pay an information cost to reduce the variance of the job offer distribution. A lower variance increases the worker's expected match quality but decreases the offer arrival rate. Results show higher-skilled workers target their search more intensely, decreasing the expected level of mismatch among higher-skilled workers and allowing the model to better fit the data on skill mismatch and sorting.

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Chapter 3 entitled "Trends in Hispanic Earnings Volatility: investigates differences in income volatility between Hispanic men and women, versus white and black non-Hispanic men and women, and among Hispanics of different national origins, by examining which groups face the largest risks of experiencing a large drop in economic resources, how relative risks have changed over time, and what the patterns tell us about the sources of differential trends. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979), this essay compares two measures of earnings volatility: a volatility decomposition developed by Gottschalk and Moffitt (1994) and the standard deviation of arc percent change to document changes over time in the cross-sectional distribution of income changes. The NLSY shows that, for all groups, earnings volatility is lower today than in 1979. This finding is counter to previous research using other data sets (the PSID, CPS, SIPP, and LEHD) and likely reflects a life-cycle effect, whereby young people settle into stable jobs over the first 10-20 years of their careers and their earnings volatility falls. However, the data show some differences in levels of earnings volatility across subethnicities that are invariant to the volatility measure used, and hold up when individual characteristics are controlled for, namely that earnings volatility is relatively high for Puerto Ricans and non-Hispanic blacks and relatively low for Cubans; in the middle of the range, earnings volatility is similar for Mexicans, other Hispanic groups, and non-Hispanic whites. Further research would be valuable for explaining the sources of these differences across groups, and the extent to which policies could help attenuate earnings volatility among groups for which it is relatively high.

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In two essays, I empirically examine the effects of a change in affirmative action policies on the human capital development of minority children relative to white children. My first essay analyzes how these policy changes impacted acquired ability, as measured by achievement test scores, for minority children of different ages. I utilize both difference-in-difference-in-difference and individual fixed effects methodologies to show that achievement test scores among thirteen and fourteen year old African-American children dropped significantly relative to whites after the policy changes. My second essay further analyzes the causes of these drops in test scores. Specifically, I investigate whether changes in parental and child investment variables occurred as a result of these policy changes, and whether these changes can explain the significant drops in minority test scores. These analyses utilize data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (CNLSY79). The results should help to further identify and explain the causes of the large acquired skill gaps that exist between minority and white children, and to therefore help inform policy aimed at eliminating these skill gaps.

I. The Effects of Affirmative Action Policies in University Admissions on Human Capital Development of Minority Children: a Test of the Expectations Hypothesis.
It has been well documented that minority children leave primary school with lower levels of acquired skill than do their white counterparts. The causes of this "skill gap", however, are not well understood. This paper attempts to analyze one possible cause: the impact of perceived labor market discrimination on the human capital development of minority children. Using the CNLSY79 data, I take advantage of recent changes in affirmative action laws regarding university admissions in California and Texas as a natural experiment. I employ both difference-in-difference-in-difference and individual fixed effects methodologies to test for changes in achievement test scores among minority children between the ages of 7 and 14. The results show a significant drop in test scores among thirteen and fourteen year old African-Americans in the affected states relative to whites, but no significant impact among Hispanics. Younger age groups show negative, but insignificant effects. These results suggest that expectations do play a role in the human capital investment of minority children and further research in this area is warranted.

II. The Effect of Expectations about Future Opportunities on Human Capital Investment by Minority Parents and Children.
Given the large skill gaps that exist between minority and white children, and the degree to which these skill gaps are correlated with labor markets outcomes, it is important to understand why these skill gaps exist. Of particular concern is the fact that these skill gaps are present in children prior to entering kindergarten. In this paper, I analyze the impact of racially disparate future expectations among minority parents and children on their human capital investment decisions. A labor-leisure choice model is used to show that a perceived difference in future opportunities for minority children relative to whites should result in a reduction of human capital investment. This model is tested using changes in affirmative action laws to determine if parental and child human capital investments are affected by the changes in the policy. This paper utilizes the CNLSY79 data, which contain a number of parent and child input variables that are highly correlated with achievement test scores. The empirical results will be used to determine if the significant drops in minority test scores found in chapter one can be explained by changes in parental or child behavior. Additionally, these results will provide evidence on whether parental responses to negative expectations can be considered a plausible explanation for the large skill gaps that exist at very young ages.

Bibliography Citation

Caldwell, Ronald C., Jr. Essays on the Effect of Expectations about Future Opportunities on the Human Capital Development of Minority Children. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Washington, June 2007.

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In this dissertation, I explore whether parental wealth influences child development, including children's math and reading achievement, behavior problems and motor and social development. Using the linked lives framework and drawing upon social capital theory, I hypothesize that wealth affects children's development through the provision of the home environment, including parenting behaviors and material goods and services. Additionally, I argue that parental aspirations for the child's education may shape child achievement. My sample is drawn from the NLSY79 mother-child data, and I calculate parental wealth in three different ways: from the child's birth to age 5, current wealth at the time of the child's assessment, and average wealth over the course of the child's life. My results show that parental wealth affects the quality of the home environment that parents provide for their children with wealthier parents providing stronger home environments than less affluent parents. The initial positive, significant effect of wealth on child math and reading achievement is attenuated and eventually reduced to non-significance after I control for parent and family attributes, including home environment quality. However, parental wealth continues to effect child behavior problems even after adjusting for factors believed to impact child social adjustment.

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This research study takes a unique approach to examining time preference since the experimental community lacks a clear consensus on how to best measure this construct. Standard risk and time preferences measures are typically achieved through responses to financially incentivized choice questions. Researchers have argued that incentivized choice questions may be common but they lack precision. Therefore, combining behaviors that involve intertemporal tradeoffs into a scale to measure time preference is believed to be a more accurate indicator of time preference. However, there is little research that has reliably developed and tested its use. This research examines time preference by comparing incentive choice questions as a proxy for time preference as well as an additive scale of intertemporal behaviors using a national representative sample.

Regression analysis revealed that that time preference measured using an additive scale of intertemporal behaviors was significantly associated with net worth. The incentive choice questions as a measure of time preference were not significantly associated with net worth. The respondents with a high rate of intertemporal discounting as measured by the time preference scale accumulated less net-worth than respondents with a lower rate of intertemporal discounting. In addition, in the regression model when individual behaviors involving intertemporal tradeoffs such as smoking, drinking, and not taking physical exams were added as individual behaviors, the model was the preferred predictor of net worth.

Bibliography Citation

Canale, Anthony. The Association between Time Preference and Net Worth: Incentivized Choice and Scaled Approach Using the NLSY79. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Family Studies and Human Services, Kansas State University, 2018.

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Earnings across the lifecycle depend both on agents initial conditions (pre-market factors, i.e. skills individuals acquire before entering the labor market) as well as on their labor market experience. In the following chapters I study differences in these initial conditions and the dynamics of earnings within and across employers.

What explains differences in pre-market factors? Three types of inputs are believed to determine the skills agents take to the labor market: ability, family inputs and school inputs. Therefore it is crucial to understand first the importance of each of these inputs. The literature on the production of achievement has not been able to provide an estimation that can take the three factors into account simultaneously at the student level. Chapter 1 attempts to fill this gap by providing an estimation of the production function of achievement where both types of investments (families and schools) are considered in a framework where the inputs are allowed to be correlated with the unobserved term, ability to learn. I do this by applying Olley and Pakes' (1996) algorithm which accommodates for endogeneity problems in the choice of inputs for the production of achievement and by using parents saving for their child's postsecondary education to control for the unobserved component (i.e. ability to learn) in the production of skills. What makes this saving measure informative is the fact that parents decide it at the same time they choose the home and school inputs that will affect the observed test score (the current outcome). However those savings will not affect the current outcome, but instead will affect future labor market outcomes through college choices. The estimates for the role of family inputs are in line with previous findings. Additionally, the estimates of school inputs show that they are also important for the formation of students' skills even after controlling for ability to learn. The estimates of the production funct
ion are used to compute counterfactual exercises. In particular, this paper evaluates what would happen if the inputs for black students are reassigned so that their inputs are the actual amount they receive plus the differential that white students receive. This exercise shows that equalizing home inputs would reduce the achievement gap by 15.6 percent while equalizing school inputs would do it by 9.2 percent. If instead inputs are altered only in 12th grade, house and school inputs have a similar impact on students' achievement: school inputs would reduce the gap by 7.2 percent while home inputs would do it by 7.4 percent.

Chapter 2 explores a further area that Chapter 1 does not discuss: whether parents substitute or complement families and school inputs. Parents may alter the investment in their child's human capital in response to changes in schooling inputs. If substitutability between parental and school inputs in the production of achievement is prevalent, then increases in school inputs could crowd out parental inputs. If instead there exist couplementarities between school and parental inputs, then increases in school inputs might increase parental involvement. Chapter 2 studies whether parents react when their child's school inputs decrease by studying out-of-school suspensions and their effect on parental involvement. Because out-of-school suspensions are chosen by the class teacher or the principal of the school and not by the parents, they are a good candidate for exogenous (to parental choice) variation in the level of school resources across students. Out-of-school suspensions are a consequence of student misbehavior, and thus do not occur randomly across students. Therefore, in order to capture the effect of how parents react to the decrease in school inputs, I instrument the number of out-of-school suspensions with measures of "principal's preference toward discipline." The identification comes from the fact that students in schools
wi
th stricter principals are more likely to be suspended. The estimates show that without controlling for selection, out-of-school suspensions are negatively correlated with the level of parental involvement. Once selection is taken into account, the effect disappears.

Earnings depend not only on pre-market factors but also on the agent's experience in the labor market. That is, it is important which job he gets and how his earnings evolve within and across employers. In their seminal paper, Topel and Ward (1992) estimate that nearly a third of total wage growth in the first 10 years of labor market experience is due to wage jumps at the time of changing a job. Unfortunately, the job ladder model, the workhorse for this literature, cannot explain the big number of wage cuts for workers that change employers (as opposed to those who remain in their job). An extension of the job ladder model that has been proposed to ameliorate this failure is the introduction of a shock to the existing employer-employee match. But such a process has not been identified empirically in the literature yet. Chapter 3 uses a particular feature of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to provide a convincing identification strategy for the wage shock process: two measures of workers' compensation, wages and labor earnings. The first part of the chapter shows that although the dynamics of wages are consistent with a job ladder model, the same is not true for the dynamics of earnings. While relatively large wage increases follow job-to-job transitions. we observe that job-to-job transitions are negatively correlated with hourly earnings. We speculate that this is due to the fact that job-to-job transitions are more likely to follow a large reduction in wages. We find that this result is robust to mis-measurement in the labor supply and disappears for workers paid by the year. The rationale for this last finding is that. workers paid by the year are much less likely to
be
hit by wage shocks than other workers. Using the multiple measures of workers' compensation and data on employment transition, we calibrate a modified job ladder model that allows for shocks to the employer-employee snatch. We show that the model fits the data well and that a model that does not include this feature would fail to match the data.

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One of the most substantial social developments in the United States over the last half century has been the dramatic shift in the way individuals now experience marriage and parenthood. These demographic changes are important because marital and parental status, as well as the timing and order in which these family transitions are made, affect psychological well-being. Although the links between marriage, parenthood, and well-being are well-established, these research findings and the policies based on them implicitly assume that the associations between marriage, parenthood, and psychological well-being are universal and invariant, when in fact they are not.

In this study I focus on one under explored set of factors - individuals' life course expectations - which may condition these associations. Although a large body of research and theory in developmental psychology emphasizes the importance of expectations in shaping identity development and consequently, well-being, sociological and demographic research on family status and mental health has, with a few exceptions, largely ignored this perspective. I integrate these two research traditions to develop and test a theoretical model which argues that the mental health effects of role acquisition or absence, and the timing and sequencing of role entry, likely depends on expectations for role acquisition, timing, and sequencing.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) I find substantial variation in individuals' ability to meet their expectations for the occurrence, timing, and sequencing of marriage and parenthood. For the most part, recent increases in permanent singlehood, age at marriage, childlessness, age at first birth, and pre-marital childbearing were not expected. OLS regression on respondents' reported depressive symptoms at age 40 indicate that expectations for the occurrence, timing, and sequencing of marriage and parenthood generally moderate mental he
alth outcomes associated with the transition into marriage and parenthood, producing significant variation not only in mental health outcomes but also in mental health differences across marital and parental status. The fact that most of the demographic changes in family formation were not expected indicates that for those at their forefront these changes resulted in a substantial degree of structural strain, leaving few in this cohort psychologically unaffected.

Bibliography Citation

Carlson, Daniel Lee. Well, What Did You Expect?: Family Transitions, Life Course Expectations, and Mental Health. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 2010..

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This dissertation examines the role that psychological factors play in explaining the gender wage gap. To do so, I propose a methodology that extends the standard approach used in the literature interested in this question in three main dimensions. First, I rely on an economic model that captures multiple channels through which gender differences in traits can influence gender wage inequality. Second, I account for measurement error in the measures of psychological traits by using latent factor models. Third, I estimate entire counterfactual wage distributions in order to measure the contribution of gender differences in traits to the gender wage gap along the whole wage distribution instead of focusing on its mean. Implementing this methodology in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find that gender differences in cognition and self-confidence explain a considerable fraction of the gender wage gap, with the majority of this effect being due to gender differences in self-confidence. Moreover, I establish evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the effect that gender gaps in psychological traits have on the gender wage gap along the wage distribution. In particular, gender gaps in self-confidence and, to a lesser extent, cognition explain a greater fraction of the gender wage gap at the top than at the bottom of the wage distribution. By comparing my estimates to those obtained from implementing two standard decomposition methods widely used in the gender wage gap literature, I show that failing to account for the heterogeneity of returns to traits across occupations and for measurement error in observed measures of traits leads to substantial biases in the analysis of the role that psychological factors play in explaining the gender wage gap.

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The developmental and life-course criminology (DLC) paradigm has become increasingly popular over the last two decades. A primary limitation of this paradigm is the lack of consideration of race and ethnicity within its framework. Race unquestionably matters in today's society and yet it has generally been ignored within the context of DLC theories. The current study aims to contribute to the literature informing DLC by viewing life-course theories through the lens of race and ethnicity. Utilizing nationally-representative data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the current study examines race-specific developmental trajectories of offending over 11 years during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The current study employs semiparametric group-based mixture modeling (SPGM) in order to assess heterogeneity in the development of offending both in general and across race and ethnicity. Racial and ethnic differences in offending trajectories are explored and the relevance of these findings is discussed in relation to extant DLC theories. Additionally, the current study explores the utility of theoretically relevant risk and protective factors for distinguishing between offending trajectories and examines whether or not the ability of these factors to distinguish trajectories varies across race and ethnicity. In examining the generality of risk factors across offending trajectories, the current research also explores the utility of general versus developmental theories of offending.

The results of the current study indicate that there are stark similarities in the number and patterns of offending trajectories that emerge across race and ethnicity. Additionally, the current study finds support for both general and race-specific effects regarding the ability of risk and protective factors to distinguish offending trajectories. The finding that some risk factors have race-specific effects has implications for DLC theories which predict
racial invariance in the causal processes that influence offending throughout the life-course. Additionally, the current study finds little evidence of trajectory-specific etiologies across the full study sample. This finding supports general over developmental theories and is consistent with prior research which indicates that risk factors are best able to distinguish between offenders and non-offenders rather than between offenders who follow divergent developmental trajectories. Overall, the current study findings contribute to the growing body of empirical research examining key DLC issues in the context of race and ethnicity.

Bibliography Citation

Caudy, Michael S. Assessing Racial Differences in Offending Trajectories: A Life-Course View of the Race-Crime Relationship. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Criminology, University of South Florida, 2011.

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Locus of control and human capital investment revisited. Locus of control (LOC) is a psychological concept that measures the extent to which an individual believes she has control over her life (internal control) as opposed to believing that luck controls her life (external control). Findings from the early empirical literature suggested that internal LOC is related to higher educational attainment and earnings. However, a key concern in the early literature is that LOC could merely be a proxy for unobserved ability, which could itself increase education and earnings. To distinguish between the effects of LOC and the effects of ability, Coleman and DeLeire (2003) present a model of human capital investment that incorporates LOC. I test the predictions of the Coleman-DeLeire model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. My findings fail to support Coleman and DeLeire's predictions and suggest that LOC is not a significant determinant of educational outcomes once cognitive ability is controlled for; however, LOC does lead to higher earnings later in life.

Employer-provided health insurance and labor supply of married women. This work presents new evidence on the effect of husbands' health insurance on wives' labor supply. Previous cross-sectional studies have estimated a significant negative effect of spousal coverage on wives' labor supply. However, these estimates potentially suffer from bias because wives' labor supply and the health insurance status of their husbands are interdependent and chosen simultaneously. This paper attempts to obtain consistent estimates by using several panel data methods. In particular, the likely correlation between unobserved characteristics of husbands and wives affecting labor supply--such as preferences for work--can be captured using panel data on intact marriages, and potential joint job choice decisions can be controlled using fixed-effects instrumental variables methods. The findings, using data from the Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, suggest that the negative effect of spousal coverage on labor supply found in cross-sections results mainly from spousal sorting and selection. There is only a small estimable effect of spousal coverage on wives' labor supply.

Health insurance tax credits and health insurance coverage of low-income single mothers. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 introduced a refundable tax credit for low-income families who purchased health insurance coverage for their children. This health insurance tax credit (HITC) existed during tax years 1991, 1992, and 1993, and was then rescinded. We use Current Population Survey data and a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the HITC's effect on private health insurance coverage of low-income single mothers. The findings suggest that during 1991-1993, the health insurance coverage of single mothers was about 6 percentage points higher than it would have been in the absence of the HITC.

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This thesis studies three different aspects of the labor market functioning. In the first chapter I investigate how the unemployment insurance (UI) system affects match quality. The argument is that UI enables workers to sort themselves into better jobs. I present a model of job-search that predicts procyclical match quality and that higher UI reduces mismatch over the cycle. Using data from the NLSY I find that a higher level of UI increases duration of postunemployment matches started in both phases of the cycle, and that this effect is larger in recessions, decreasing the cyclical sensitivity of match quality. These results point out to a beneficial effect of the UI system often neglected in policy debates. The second chapter studies the wage setting process. I present a simple matching model that predicts a decrease in wage sensitivity to the labor market stance as the employment relationship evolves. The worker appropriates a portion of the value of the match-specific human capital she is accumulating, thereby gradually becoming shielded from the vagaries of the labor market. I present empirical evidence supporting this prediction: the elasticity of wages to the unemployment rate decreases with tenure. This result is robust to different specifications that allow for job heterogeneity, and it contributes to the interpretation of recent evidence of changes in the effect of the business cycle on wages. The third chapter discusses the role for self-employment in a highly regulated labor market with low unemployment rate. Self-employment can be better characterized as a host of jobs, close substitute to salaried work, being the way the market tries to work around the government intervention of firing costs. The Portuguese case is considered. Using worker level data I characterize transitions into and out of self-employment. The typical worker entering self-employment after losing a salaried job does not experience unemployment, enters self-employment in growing indu
stries, and does not have a high-school diploma. These results are consistent with self-employment matches having the flexibility characteristics of low quality jobs, allowing less skilled workers to find alternative jobs.

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In this thesis, a dynamic model is estimated to analyze the effect of economic incentives on crime involvement and recidivism of
young people. The model assumes that the utility of individuals depends on their earnings from legal work and illegal activities.
Every period, young agents face an expected wage. They may get extra income from criminal activities but lose some when punishment
occurs. There are two types of punishment: arrest and
incarceration. Criminals have to pay a fine if arrested but need
to serve sentences from months to years with no earnings if incarcerated.
The model is estimated through the SMM using data
from the NLSY97, a nationally representative survey of 8984 individuals
with employment records, criminal information, illegal
income, and detailed arrest and sentence records, as well as other
socio-demographic information.

Bibliography Citation

Chan, Yun-Shan. A Structural Analysis of Crime and Economic Incentives of Youth. Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2012.

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Recently, a great deal of attention has been paid to the stage-sequential process for the longitudinal data and a number of methods for analyzing stage-sequential processes have been derived from the family of finite mixture modeling. However, research on the sequential process is rendered difficult by the fact that the number of latent components is not known a priori. To address this problem, we propose two solutions, reversible jump MCMC and the Bayesian non-parametric approach, so as to provide a set of principles for the systematic model selection for the stage-sequential process. The reversible jump MCMC sampler can explore parameter space and automatically learn the model. Nevertheless, we have found that reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo requires the efficient design of proposal mechanism as jumping rules. To reduce the technical and computational burdens, we propose a Bayesian non-parametric approach to select the number of latent components. Using a latent class-profile analysis, we test both algorithms on synthesized data sets to evaluate their performances in model selection problems.

Once a model is selected, the model parameters are needed to be estimated. The expectation-maximization algorithm (Dempster et al., 1977) and the data augmentation using MCMC (Hastings, 1970; Tanner and Wong, 1987a) are widely-used techniques to draw statistical inferences of the parameters for the LCPA model. As a number of measurement occasions increases in the LCPA model, however, the computation cost of expectation-maximization or MCMC will become exponentially intensive. On the contrary, if one adapts recursive scheme in the update steps, calculations will be simplified and become generalized to more time points. In light of this, we formulate each update step with recursive terms which are directly analogous to forward-backward algorithm (Chib, 1996; MacKay, 1997).

The parameter estimation for the LCPA model benefits from recursive formula, but the recursive algorithm still requires careful examination for the existence of multiple local modes of the objective function (i.e., log-likelihood). Applying the recursive formula, we implement deterministic annealing EM (Ueda and Nakano, 1998) and deterministic annealing variant of variational Bayes (Katahiral et al., 2008) in order to find parameter estimates on the global mode of the objective function. Both methods are based on the deterministic annealing framework, in which ω is included as an annealing parameter to control the annealing rate. By adjusting the value of ω, the annealing process tracks multiple local modes and identifies the globalized optimum as a result.

At last, we are interested in analyzing the early onset drinking behaviours among the young generation. We apply latent class-profile analysis to alcohol drinking behaviours as manifest in self-reported items drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which was a survey that explores the transition from school to work and from adolescence to adulthood in the USA. To unveil the stage-sequential bevaviroal progressions, we adopt dynamic Dirichlet learning process to characterize the probable progressions in a discrete manner and then identify patterns in which similar progressions are grouped. For the parameter estimations, we conduct deterministic annealing approaches with predetermined annealing schedule.

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Maternal depression has been well documented to adversely impact maternal-child relationships, parenting practices, family functioning, and children's development and well-being. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this dissertation first examined the effects of maternal depressive symptoms (MDS) on the trajectories of child problem behaviors (CPB) through growth curve model analysis. Further, this dissertation investigated the association between MDS and offspring substance use from childhood to adulthood by applying Generalized Estimating Equations analysis. Finally, the dissertation used data from the Florida Healthy Start Prenatal Screening program to study the lifetime mental health services use (MHS) by race/ethnicity among pregnant women with depression. Findings of this dissertation indicate that children of mothers with depressive symptoms had higher levels of CPB over time. The adverse effect of early exposure to MDS on CPB may be greater for younger children than older children. The effects of MDS on CPB varied by different levels of father's involvement. Higher levels of father's involvement were associated with less CPB. Similarly, early exposure to MDS was associated with increased risk of cigarette and marijuana use but not with alcohol use from childhood to young adulthood, after controlling for confounders. In the investigation of MHS, Whites were more likely to use MHS than Blacks and Hispanics. Racial/ethnic differences were found in the factors that impede or enable MHS use. Residential instability, drug/alcohol use during pregnancy, an existing illness, and violence victimization were significant predictors of increased use of MHS use among all ethnic subgroups after controlling for covariates. Higher education attainment increased MHS use among Whites and Hispanics only. Health insurance coverage and smoking during pregnancy significantly predicted increased use of MHS among Blacks and Hispanics only. Having more children is inversely associated with MHS use among Whites. Findings from this dissertation further our understanding of the long term effects of MDS on child problem behaviors and factors related to racial differences in MHS women with depression. Maternal depression is an important public health problem. Policies and programs that promote depression screening among women are needed to ensure positive developmental outcomes in children.

Bibliography Citation

Chang, Jen Jen. Effects of Maternal Depressive Symptomatology on the Continuity and Discontinuity of Problem Behaviors and Substance Use in Offspring: A Life Course Perspective. Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Public Health, Department of Maternal and Child Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 2006. DAI-B 66/09, p. 4752, Mar 2006.

Skills over the Life Cycle: Evidence from the United States and the Philippines
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, 2016
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Life Cycle Research; Occupational Choice; Occupational Information Network (O*NET); Skills; Wage Dynamics

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Chapter 2 explores the skill content of occupational choices in the United States. The goal of the chapter is to measure the wage return to math and language skills, taking into account the self-selection process of occupational choice. Occupations must be treated as endogenous variables in any wage equation. I instrument the importance of math for a worker's occupation in her thirties and forties with the importance of math for the worker's preferred occupation back in her early twenties. A similar instrumental variable is proposed for language skills. This empirical strategy is possible after the combination of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY79) and the Occupational Information Network (O*Net).

Bibliography Citation

Chaparro, Juan. Skills over the Life Cycle: Evidence from the United States and the Philippines. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, 2016.

Essays in Information and Labor Economics
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2017
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Gender Attitudes/Roles; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Job Search; Labor Market Outcomes; Siblings; Wage Rates

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The second part of the thesis make a contribution to the sibling literature in Labor Economics, excavating sibling gender influences on important labor market outcomes and interactions. In chapter IV, we use US data from Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID 1968–2011) to analyse sibling effects on occupational choices. In chapter V, family influences on employment status, marital status, educational outcomes, childhood home environments, gender beliefs, and job search is evaluated to document the impact of sibling gender on real wages using US data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79).

Bibliography Citation

Chatterjee, Twisha. Essays in Information and Labor Economics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2017.

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This dissertation presents three essays in health economics. The first essay sheds light on the relationship between health insurance and access to care. The second essay considers the relationship between health and labor markets. The third essay explores one facet of health inequality.

The second essay concentrates on how health affects labor market outcomes. Past empirical work establishes a wage penalty from being overweight. In this essay, I exploit variation in an individual's weight over time to determine the age when weight has the largest impact on labor market outcomes. For white men, controlling for weight at younger ages does not eliminate the effect of older adult weight on wage: being overweight as a young adult only adds an additional penalty to adult wages. However, for white women, what they weigh in their early twenties solely determines the existence of an adult wage penalty. The female early-twenties weight penalty has a persistent effect on wages, and differences in marital characteristics, occupation status, or education cannot explain it. It also is not a proxy for intergenerational unobservables.

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We consider a modified Buckley-James estimator (BJE) in a multivariate linear regression model in the presence of mixed interval-censoring. The BJE is one of the famous estimates which can be viewed as the counterpart of the least squares estimators (LSE). It was originally introduced by Buckley and James (1979) for right-censored data.

For simplification and motivated by the data set from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we only consider a bivariate linear regression model with β = (β 1 , β 2 ), where β 1 and β 2 are both p × 1 vectors. We show that if β 1 ≠ β 2 , then it degenerates to a univariate linear regression model which is classified as case 1 in here. On the other hand, we show that if there is a linear restriction on β, for instance, the two column vectors in β are the same, that is β 1 = β 2 , it is a bivariate linear regression model which does not degenerate to a univariate linear regression model and is classified as case 2.

In this thesis, we propose to estimate the regression coefficients by a modified Buckley-James estimator and show that the modified BJE is consistent and has asymptotic normality under certain discontinuous regularity conditions for both case 1 and case 2. Moreover, in case 1, various non-normal asymptotic distributions of the BJE are presented when the regularity conditions are violated. In case 2, we further carry out simulation studies to compare the asymptotic properties of the modified BJE under different sample sizes and various continuous underlying distributions. We also perform data analysis to the NLSY79 data.

We further consider the estimation problem in case 1 with missing covariates involved, which is denoted as case 3. The extension of the BJE based on the generalized maximum likelihood estimator (GMLE) of the underlying distribution is discussed. The Newton-Raphson (NR) method is not feasible in computing the GMLE due to the large sample size of the real data example. We propose a self-consistent algorithm to bypass this difficulty.

Bibliography Citation

Chen, Cuixian. Asymptotic Properties of the Buckley-James Estimator for a Bivariate Interval Censorship Regression Model. Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2007. DAI-B 68/07, Jan 2008.

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My dissertation studies three essays in financial aid and education. Chapter one studies the impact of student loan forgiveness plans on life-cycle decisions. A series of changes in U.S. policy on student loan repayment plans occurred between 1993 and 2015. Before the changes in policy, student loan debts were not forgiven and borrowers were expected to repay the full amount of debt. After the changes in policy, borrowers were given options to relieve a portion of their debt, with the portion being a function of income and sector of employment (public and non-profit vs. private). To study the effect of changes in student loan repayment plans on schooling, work, and borrowing decisions, I propose and structurally estimate a life-cycle dynamic discrete choice model. My simulation results imply that changes in student loan repayment plans will increase total years of postsecondary schooling by 10%, from 2.06 years to 2.29 years. In addition, 0.5% of the population who would have worked in the private sector will shift to the public sector, and 15% of student loan borrowers will be forgiven part of their debt.

Chapter two studies the impact of housing wealth on college enrollment in the housing boom and the housing bust. I take advantage of the recent housing boom and bust as an exogenous source of variation. I find that a $10,000 increase in home equity increases the probability of initial college enrollment by 0.19 percentage points. Housing wealth has a larger impact on college enrollment during the housing bust than during the housing boom. The asymmetry is only economically and statistically significant for families with lower annual incomes. According to my estimates, the decline in home equity during the housing bust would have caused a drop in college enrollment of 3.5 percentage points, or 9.6%, for families with income less than $70,000, other things equal. My results provide important implications for government financial aid policy. If the goal of the government is to maximize the college enrollment impact of a given level of financial assistance, it is useful for the government to implement a need-based counter-cyclical financial aid policy.

Chapter three studies the long-term effects of kindergarten enrollment on individuals' educational and social outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Chen, Hongyu. Three Essays in Financial Aid and Education. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2018.

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Skills learned in early childhood play an important role in the formation of human capabilities and social equality in adulthood. A handful of studies have linked socioeconomic status and family background to academic and behavioral skills in early childhood. However, relatively few studies have considered health a potentially influential factor in the development of early childhood skills. Even fewer studies have considered health indicators other than birth weight. My dissertation addresses this concern by providing a solid assessment of the role of early childhood health in children's developmental outcomes. I focused on two prevalent health conditions that have been overlooked in the demographic and sociological literature: prenatal drinking and childhood asthma. The two research studies relied on multiple sources of data, including the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 Cohort, the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, and used a variety of methods, including descriptive analyses, multivariate regressions, fixed-effects models, and multiple imputation. drinking and childhood asthma.

Bibliography Citation

Chen, Jen-Hao. Early Childhood Health and Inequalities in Children’s Academic and Behavioral Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2012.

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In the first essay, I discuss the theoretical framework of equal opportunity. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young 1979 (NLSY79), I estimate the level of inequality of opportunity for health in the United States. Using a supplement survey of NLSY79, I further study the channels through which inequality of opportunity arises. My evidence suggests that inequality of opportunity for health exists for children and young adults as well. This offers support for the hypothesis that the origins of health inequality would have risen from disparities in early life experiences.

In the second essay, I use an index based on Roemer [1998] to study the effect of education policies on health inequality in two exercises. First, I use the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the effect of compulsory schooling reform on health inequality. Second, I use NLSY79 to study the effect of the court-ordered education financing reforms in the United States. My results indicate that the British reform does not have any significant effect on equality of opportunity for health. The U.S. reform, however, appears to be equality enhancing under our framework. In the third essay, I discuss the optimal level of cigarette tax under the equal opportunity framework. Using cigarette taxation as policy instrument, I compute the level of health inequity under different tax rates. I estimate an empirical model in which return to smoking is allowed to vary across individuals. Policy simulations are performed to estimate the optimal cigarette taxation to equalize opportunity for health.

The Role of Family and Gender in the Transfer of and Returns to Human Capital
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of South Carolina, 2018
Cohort(s):
NLSY97
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Gender; Skills; Supervisor Characteristics; Wages

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This dissertation explores the role of family and gender in understanding the disparities in human capital accumulation and corresponding disparities in labor market outcomes.

The first chapter explores the relationship between workers' wages and the gender of their supervisor, conditioning on the occupational gender composition. It develops a theoretical model suggesting that supervisors' task assignment accuracy is affected disparately in occupations of different gender types, leading to varying degrees of skill mismatch among workers. This leads to average wage differences between workers with female supervisors and those with male supervisors in occupations of different gender types. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, the empirical evidence suggests that workers have better occupation-skill matches and higher average wages if they work with female supervisors in predominantly female occupations, compared to those with male supervisors; the opposite is true for workers in predominantly male occupations. Although not significant at the early career stage, supervisor wage effects emerge as a worker’s career develops. These findings emphasize the importance of supervisors' task assignment accuracy in workplace gender wage disparity, and underscore the necessity of integrating minority managers to the "gendered" organizational contexts.

Bibliography Citation

Chen, Liwen. The Role of Family and Gender in the Transfer of and Returns to Human Capital. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of South Carolina, 2018.

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Young people are psychologically immature, and are easy to be influenced by others to engage in risky behaviors. Based on the data from the NLSY79, this dissertation examines how maternal smoking, sibling smoking, and living in urban and rural areas impact on youth smoking decisions.

Bibliography Citation

Chen, Min. Social Interaction and Youth Smoking. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, State University of New York at Albany, 2013.

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Ample evidence indicates that regular physical activity has many human health benefits. Maintenance of good physical fitness enables one to meet the physical demands of work and leisure comfortably and be less prone to a number of illnesses. In addition to physical inactivity, a poor diet is another factor in energy imbalance (more calories consumed than expended). According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005, physical inactivity and poor diets are the two most important factors contributing to the increase in overweight and obesity in the United States. Overweight and obesity are major risk factors for certain chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and some forms of cancer. However, over the past forth-five years, the obesity rate of U.S. adults has almost tripled, rising from 13% to 35%.

The objective of this study is to examine women's and men's decisions to participate in demanding physical activity and attain a healthy weight. To achieve this, a productive household model of investment in health is first derived. Second, both trivariate probit and seemingly-unrelated-regression models of decisions on physical activity and BMI or obesity are developed. These outcomes are hypothesized to be related to health attitudes, prices of food, drink and health care services and products, the respondent's personal characteristics (such as education, adjusted family income, opportunity cost of time, occupation, marital status, race and ethnicity) and the respondent's BMI or being overweight at age 25. Third, data from the 2004 round of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) are used to fit the models.

Due to basic physiological differences in men and women, separate analyses are undertaken for men and women. Also, two physical activity equations, one for participating in moderate physical activity and the other one for participating in vigorous physical activity, are fitted. Findings include: an individual who ha
s a higher adjusted family income has a lower current BMI or a lower likelihood of being obese; females with higher education are more likely to be obese or have higher BMI, while males with higher education are less likely to be obese or have lower BMI; older males within our cohort have higher BMI or higher likelihood of being obese; higher prices for fresh fruits and vegetables and non-alcoholic drinks increase BMI and likelihood of obesity for females but not for males; and higher prices for processed fruits and vegetables reduce BMI and likelihood of obesity for females but not for males. In a joint test of the null hypothesis of no food and drink price effects on the possibility to be obese, the hypothesis was rejected for women but not for men. When exercise is measured in minutes and weight as BMI, the hypothesis of no effects of the prices of food and drink on BMI is rejected for women but not for men. When individuals are classified as over-weight or not over-weight at age 25 and exercise is measure in minutes and weight is measured as BMI, the null hypothesis of no impact of food and drink prices on these outcomes is rejected for early non-overweight females, but not for males or early overweight females.

Bibliography Citation

Chen, Yanni. An Economic Analysis of Decisions on Physical Activity and Energy Imbalance: Cross-Sectional Evidence from a Panel of Middle-Aged Adults. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, 2009..

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The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between job training participation and wage effects among women at mid-career in the United States. This study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women (NLSW) to explore whether mid-career women's participation in job training is related to their demographic characteristics, education, and work experiences. The employment outcomes in terms of hourly wage rates associated with job training participation among women at late career were also investigated.

First, significant relationships were found between participation in job training and race, education, occupation, and typical length of work duration each year among women at mid-career. Whites were more likely than non-Whites to participate in both on-the-job (OJT) training and other training courses or educational programs (Other training). Women with education beyond high school were more likely to receive OJT and other training than those who were high school graduates or less. Women who were employed in professional, managerial, or technical occupations were more likely to receive both OJT and other training than those who worked in other occupations. In addition, women who typically worked for longer durations each year had greater odds of receiving job training than those who worked a shorter duration each year.

Second, a significantly positive relationship was found between mid-career women's participation in OJT over their working life and their hourly wage rates. However, participation in other training showed no significant relationship with wage rates. Findings from this study also revealed that women who were White, had a higher education degree, worked in the manufacturing industry, worked in a professional, managerial, or technical occupation, and typically worked a longer duration each year, tended to receive a higher hourly rate of pay. Based on these findings, several recommendations may be offered. (1) There is a need to close the gap in post-school training acquisition for women who tend to receive less training. (2) These findings support the need to continually promote continuing education programs and training services for mid-career women. (3) The goal of training policies should be to improve women's job placements. Also, training policies should serve to enhance women's employability and job mobility after the usual schooling age, when they may work longer and thus remain longer in the labor market.

Bibliography Citation

Chen, Ying-Ni. Participation in Job Training Over Working Life and Employment Outcomes Among Mid-Career Women in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2005. DAI-A 66/10, Apr 2006..

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This dissertation explores the impact of parental wealth on the educational and homeownership outcomes of children. These two major life events entail costs that are often beyond what children can afford, thus, parents may utilize their own assets to provide assistance. Employing the use of a two-generation longitudinal dataset from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Original Cohorts (roughly the babyboom generation and their parents), I examine how parental assets impact various educational and homeownership outcomes of children. Using the disaggregated measures of parental wealth--financial assets, homeownership status and value of home--I also explore whether the mechanisms through which advantages are transferred can be attributed to financial or social influences. Analyses reveal parental assets (net of other background and demographic factors) improve a child's overall educational attainment and the probability of entering and completing higher levels of education. As well, parental wealth is associated with both a faster entry into owner-occupation and greater value of homes for children. Given the well-documented differences in wealth and homeownership between racial groups, this dissertation also investigates the extent to which parental wealth may explain the replication of inequality across generations. This is examined through an exploration of differences in parental wealth effects on homeownership outcomes between blacks and whites.

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Chapter 2. This chapter examines the extent to which gender differences in risk aversion explain why women have a lower entrepreneurship rate, earn less, and work fewer hours than men. Data from the NLSY79 confirms previous findings that women are more risk averse than men. However, while less risk averse men tend to become self-employed, there is no significant effect of risk aversion on women's entrepreneurship decisions. Similarly, greater risk aversion increases earnings for male entrepreneurs, but it has no effect on female entrepreneurial earnings. More risk aversion lowers female wages, but the effects are of modest magnitude. On the contrary, more risk aversion raises male wages. Risk aversion does not explain variation in hours of work for either men or women. These findings and standard decomposition suggest that widely reported differences in risk aversion across genders play only a trivial role in explaining gender gaps in labor market outcomes.

Chapter 3. While more risk averse individuals are less likely to become entrepreneurs, theory predicts that more risk averse entrepreneurs pick ventures with higher expected returns and so they should survive in business longer than their less risk averse counterparts. Using successive entry cohorts of young entrepreneurs in the NLSY79, we find contrary to theory that the most successful entrepreneurs are the least risk averse. This surprising finding suggests that commonly used measures of risk aversion are not indicators of taste toward risk. Instead, measured risk aversion signals weak entrepreneurial ability--the least risk averse are apparently those who can best assess and manage risks. Indeed, our interpretation is consistent with recent experimental evidence linking cognitive ability with a greater willingness to accept risk.

Chapter 4. The fourth chapter investigates the stability of measured risk attitudes over time, using a 13-year longitudinal sample of individuals in the NLSY79.

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In the second chapter, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1997, I examine the relationship between college student employment and dropouts. Since NLSY97 is surveyed annually and includes extensive information about students' educational backgrounds such as high school academic achievements, college financial aid, and the respondent's educational history, it is particularly useful to examine how student employment affects first year attrition and bachelor's degree completion. Using PSM, I estimate the average effects of treatment on the treated and I verify evidence of the treatment effect heterogeneity of student employment on college dropout by using the stratification-multilevel and smoothing-differencing methods. In this chapter, utilizing complex counterfactuals, (e.g., intense work [20 hours or more] vs. moderate work [less than 20 hours] vs. no work), I also examine variations in the effect of work intensity on dropout. In this study, I find that engaging in intense work has deleterious effects on first-year retention and on graduation within six years; however, the effects of intense work vary by likelihood of participation in intense work. The most advantaged students--who are least likely to engage in intense work--experience the most negative consequences from intense work, while such activity is less harmful to those from disadvantaged social backgrounds. I also find that this effect heterogeneity can be attributed to different financial situations and reasons for working between advantaged and disadvantaged students. This finding has two key implications. First, advantaged students should carefully consider engaging in intense work, as it can negatively affect bachelor's degree completion. Second, although the effect of intense work is less harmful for disadvantaged students, providing sufficient financial aid to them is still an important task, as this could help them to balance the intensity of work and school life.

Bibliography Citation

Choi, Yool. The Educational Expansion and Persistent Inequality: The Effects of Extra-curricular Activities on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015.

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Both substance use and employment are correlates of crime that are heavily examined by criminological research. Efforts to explore these connections have produced two rich bodies of literature that provide insight into the nuances of the relationship between substance use and offending and the relationship between employment and crime. Research shows that while substance use increases subsequent criminal behavior, employment seems to reduce offending. Given the strong positive association between substance use and crime and the inverse effect of employment on offending, it is possible that drug use and employment interact in their impact on crime. In addition to potential moderation, the relationship between drug use, employment, and crime may be explained by mediation mechanisms. Thus, the current study uses data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) to examine the possibility of moderation and/or mediation between substance use and employment in their impact on offending. Note: Similar paper also presented at Philadelphia PA, American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting, November 2017.

Bibliography Citation

Chrusciel, Margaret M. Untangling the Interconnected Relationships between Alcohol Use, Employment, and Offending. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina, 2017.

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In Chapter 2, I explore one key mechanism behind the severe occupational segregation in the non-college labor market. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (1979), I show that there exist large differences in skill profiles between men and women. In particular, "gender-based skill" for men tends to represent mechanical skill, while "gender-based skill" for women tends to represent numerical and coding ability. Using a Roy model adapted from Rosen and Willis (1979), I show that "gender-based skill" for men commands a return in the non-college labor market and therefore increases the opportunity cost of college attendance. "Gender-based skill" for women, on the other hand, does not appear to increase women's non-college earnings. Finally, I find that these skill differences significantly impact the likelihood of enrolling in college through their effect on wages. By increasing the value of the outside option to attending college for men, gender-based skill contributes to the greater college enrollment rate of women.

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Job insecurity is prevalent leading to loss of social status and poor health behaviors. The study examined the relationship between job insecurity and the probability of filing a workers' compensation claim given the experience of a work-related injury or illness. The goals were to construct job insecurity as a function of the condition of employment among workers and organizations and to investigate the consequence of workers' compensation filing.

From the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, 3,280 injured workers involving 5,204 events during 1988 through 2000 were followed up. Longitudinal analyses with 29,520 observations were conducted using SAS 9.1.

Different types of job insecurity at different level (e.g. at macro local economy level, job characteristics level, company level, and social structure level) were explored. Moreover, how different job insecurity measures at different levels are empirically related to workers' compensation outcome in the NLSY79 data was investigated.

The study found that there exist negative effects of workers' compensation filing such as lost earnings, employment disadvantages, and under-compensation by workers' compensation insurers. The study suggests that workers with low job security need to be protected from any reprisal action against their employment when they were filing for workers' compensation.

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In the first chapter, I use exogenous variation in state minimum legal drinking ages to examine the relationship between restrictions on teen alcohol consumption and youth fertility. Using individual level data, I find that a decrease in the minimum drinking age during the late 1970s and 1980s leads, surprisingly, to a decrease in pregnancy rate among 15-17 year-old white women. The pregnancy rate among 15-17 year-old black women, on the other hand, significantly increases with the decrease in the drinking age. I find similar racial variations for unwanted pregnancies among 15-17 years old. The differentiated response to changes in eligibility requirements persist for 18-20 year-old women. I find evidence of a compositional change toward wanted pregnancies associated with the decrease in drinking age for 18-20 year-old white women; the eligibility restrictions have only a statistically weak effect on fertility of 18-20 year-old blacks and Hispanics. These effects can only be found in individual level data. Analysis of state-level aggregate fertility rates fails to reveal these important racial differences.

In the second chapter, I study the effect of alcohol consumption on youth fertility. Alcohol consumption is often believed to be a cause of risk-taking behaviors. Despite a well-established correlation between alcohol intake and various risk-taking sexual behaviors, the causality remains unknown. I attempt to establish a causal effect of alcohol use on the likelihood of pregnancy among youth using a variety of models ranging from a fully parametric to a semi-parametric discrete factor approximation method. Using data on 17-28 year-old women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity alcohol consumption increases the likelihood of pregnancy by 4.7 percentage points. This positive effect was observed in the semi-parametric model where the cumulative distribution of heterogeneity was approximated by a 4-point discrete distribution. Quantitatively similar but statistically weaker estimates were obtained from the two-stage least squares model and the bivariate probit model. Finally, models that ignore the effect of unobserved heterogeneity failed to establish this relationship.

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This study employed data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to examine Black children's response to parental marital disruption over a four-year inter-survey period. Using a homogeneous sample of Black children, I examined 1) whether marital disruption in Black families has the same presumed adverse effects reported in the general literature, 2) whether family circumstances prior to the marital disruption modify the association between marital disruption and children's adjustment, and finally, 3) whether the effect of marital disruption varies by the particular child outcome under investigation. Two outcome domains were assessed—Behavioral Problem (BPI; externalizing and internalizing behaviors) and Achievement (PIAT; Mathematics and Reading). A sample of 405 children aged 4-11 were examined; however, a separate sub-sample of children aged 5-11 from this group was assessed on the PIAT subtests. Children's adjustment was assessed at Time 1, prior to divorce/separation, and later at Time 2, after the marriage ended. To investigate potential variability in children's response to parental divorce/separation, several factors preceding the actual divorce/separation were assessed, namely, parental conflict, parent-child relationship, poverty status, neighborhood problem, maternal depressive symptoms, mastery, education and employment. Results indicated pre-disruption group differences among youth in subsequently disrupted and continuously married households. These pre-separation/divorce differences were found for both samples on measures of parent-child relationship, poverty, neighborhood problem, maternal depressive symptoms, and maternal education, with relatively small effect sizes. Marital disruption was associated with a significant effect for one of the four outcome variables of interest (i.e., reading), after accounting for several child and family characteristics. Moderation analyses examined the interaction between pre-disruption factors
and marital disruption. Results revealed significant interaction effects of parent-child relationship, maternal depressive symptoms, and poverty status for behavior problems, and parental conflict for achievement. Overall the findings suggest that the scope of the effect of marital disruption is limited in the present sample of Black children, because a significant effect was found for only one of the four outcomes assessed. In addition, several of the pre-disruption factors predicted differential outcomes among the children and thereby indicate the need for future research to explain the heterogeneity of divorce/separation outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Clarke, Jenell S. Black Children's Adjustment to Their Parents' Marital Disruption: An Examination of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work and Psychology, University of Michigan, 2008..

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Chapter 1 analyzes the dynamic effects of immigration on worker outcomes by estimating an equilibrium model of local labor markets in the United States. The model includes firms in multiple cities and multiple industries which combine capital, skilled and unskilled labor in production, and forward-looking workers who choose their optimal industry and location each period as a dynamic discrete choice. Immigrant inflows change wages by changing factor ratios, but worker sector and migration choices can mitigate the effect of immigration on wages over time. I estimate the model via simulated method of moments by leveraging differences in wages and labor supply quantities across local labor markets to identify how wages and worker choices respond to immigrant inflows. Counterfactual simulations yield the following main results: (1) a sudden unskilled immigration inflow leads to an initial wage drop for unskilled workers which decreases by over half over 20 years; (2) both workers' sector-switching and migration across local labor markets play important roles in mitigating the effects of immigration on wages; (3) a gradual immigration inflow leads to significantly smaller effects on native wages than a sudden inflow.

In chapter 3, I use a dynamic model to analyze how changes in major-specific tuition levels would affect college and major choice. In my model, students face borrowing constraints; therefore, relatively small changes in tuition can potentially affect college and major choice despite large differences in lifetime earnings across majors.

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This dissertation examines the extent to which African American and White women in the United States who have experienced upward socioeconomic mobility are able to translate their achieved social class status into favorable maternal and infant health outcomes. It is comprised of three essays, each designed to investigate how changes in lifetime maternal socioeconomic position impact infant wellbeing. In Chapter 2, I argue that upwardly mobile Black women will face similar risks of giving birth to a low birthweight baby compared to chronically poor Black women due to three overarching factors: (1) pervasive structural-level racial inequalities; (2) individual-level responses to race-based discrimination; and (3) delayed childbearing. In Chapter 3, I employ data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the 1970 U.S. Census of Population and Housing to estimate the likelihood that African American and White women who were raised in or near poverty but achieved middle-class status in adulthood will give birth to a low birthweight baby. Results from a series of logistic regression analyses illustrate that for White women who grew up in families with limited financial resources, increases in family income during adulthood are associated with a lower probability of giving birth to a low birthweight baby. However, for their African American counterparts, the relationship between adult socioeconomic position and the risk of low birthweight, although also negative, is substantially weaker and fails to reach statistical significance. In Chapter 4, I utilize birth certificate and census data from a thirty-year time period, in order to estimate the extent to which Black and White women aged 10 to 29 alter the timing of their first and second births in response to fluctuating job availability. Results from fixed-effect Poisson regression models suggest that during the 1990s--a decade of considerable economic growth--young African American women, especially those aged 18 to 19, were likely to postpone childbearing in order to take advantage of improved occupational opportunities. Furthermore, the association between employment possibilities and age-, race-, and state-specific rates of first and second births cannot be explained by concurrent changes in welfare policy, incarceration rates, or abortion availability.

Bibliography Citation

Colen, Cynthia G. Socioeconomic Mobility and Reproductive Outcomes Among African American and White Women in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2005. DAI-B 66/02, p. 843, Aug 2005.

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My dissertation quantifies the impact that the perception of stigmatizing characteristics has on earnings discrimination. Two stigmatizing characteristics are studied: sexual orientation and race. The key finding is that both the perception of sexual orientation and the perception of race are endogenous to the earnings generating process.

In order to quantify the wage gap between heterosexuals and lesbians, gays and bisexuals (LGBs), a Mincer-style wage equation is estimated via Maximum Likelihood interval regression using data from the General Social Survey 1988-2002. I find that gay men face a 15% gap compared to heterosexual men, while the wage differential between lesbians and heterosexual women is very close to zero and not statistically significant.

It is often claimed that for discrimination against LGBs to take place, the employer needs to know that the employee is LGB. I estimate an endogenous switching model in which wages and the decision whether to disclose sexual orientation to the employer are simultaneously determined. When making the disclosure decision, the employee takes into account both expected discrimination and the psychological costs of non-disclosure. Using data from the Urban Men's Health Survey, I show that gay men who do not disclose their sexual orientation to their employers would face a 16% penalty for doing so.

Discrimination against racial minorities too presupposes that the employer has a perception of the employee's race. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey on Youth (NLSY) 1979-2002, I compute for each self-reported racial group (blacks, Hispanics and whites) a measure of the times in which they are perceived as white by NLSY interviewers. Blacks who are perceived as white even only occasionally face a wage gap (with respect to whites) that is less than half of the wage gap that black men who are always perceived as black face. For Hispanics, being always perceived as white eliminates the Hispanic-white wage gap completely. I also show that more educated people, people working in some white collar occupations, and people who are married are more likely to be perceived as white.

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Although much of economic theory is based on individual decision making, many major economic outcomes such as marriage, divorce and family location are the result of joint decisions between a husband and wife. In my dissertation I use theoretical and empirical methods to explore how joint and individual characteristics affect couples' decisions. The first essay considers couples' choice of location. Increasingly, both husbands and wives have specialized careers and therefore may be more likely to disagree over where to reside. Previous research has suggested that large MSAs may help solve these disagreements and for this reason, large cities are especially attractive to college educated couples. However, regression analyses using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) suggest that the joint education profile of husband and wife does not affect migration behavior--it is only the education of the husband that matters. The concentration of power couples is better explained by differences in education attainment, assortative mating and divorce patterns by city size. In the second and third chapters I consider the effect of time preference on marriage and divorce, arguing that since marriage is an investment decision, the rate at which one discounts the future is an important predictor of marital stability. In the second chapter, I develop a game theoretic model of divorce with heterogeneous time preferences and temporary shocks. The model predicts that impatient individuals are more likely to divorce and have shorter marriages than patient individuals. Regression results using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) are consistent with this finding. In the third chapter, I consider the incentives for, and effects of, assortative mating on time preferences. In contrast to other models of preference-based assortative mating in which "like" couples are less likely to divorce than "mixed" couples, I show that only those "like" couples who are patient enjoy lower divorce probabilities. Positive assortative mating may increase the probability of divorce for impatient individuals. Results from hazard regressions on PSID data are consistent with this hypothesis.

The Role Of Young Men's Attainment Of Alternate Educational Credentials In Their Entry To Fatherhood
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Human Development and Family Studies and Demography, The Pennsylvania State University, 2017
Cohort(s):
NLSY97
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Educational Attainment; Family Formation; Fatherhood; GED/General Educational Diploma/General Equivalency Degree/General Educational Development; High School Curriculum; High School Transcripts; Vocational Education; Vocational Training

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Despite previous research suggesting that men's economic position is important for family formation and in particular whether cohabiting couples will ultimately marry, there is a shortage of current research examining how men's educational attainment influences their family formation behaviors. Given the potential promise of professional licenses, certifications, and educational certificates, collectively known as alternate educational credentials (AECs), for promoting employment outcomes among low-skilled adults, the aim of this dissertation is to examine the role of young men's attainment of AECs in young men's family formation behaviors. Using 16 waves of data on young men participating in the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), I explore the prevalence of young men's attainment of AECs and whether earning AECs influences young men's entry to fatherhood and the relationship context in which they enter fatherhood.

Bibliography Citation

Constance, Nicole Faye. The Role Of Young Men's Attainment Of Alternate Educational Credentials In Their Entry To Fatherhood. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Human Development and Family Studies and Demography, The Pennsylvania State University, 2017.

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There is little consensus among social science researchers about the effectiveness of alternative parenting strategies in producing desirable child outcomes. Some argue that parents should set strict limits on the activities of their adolescent children, while others believe that adolescents should be given relatively wide discretion. In this dissertation, I develop and estimate a model of parent-child interaction in order to better understand the relationship between parenting styles and the development of human capital in children. Using data from the NLSY97, the estimates of the model indicate that the best parenting style depends on how much a child values human capital. Setting strict rules increases the study time of a child who places a low value on human capital, but decreases study time for a child who places a high value on human capital. According to the estimates, the impact of a public mandatory curfew, given these offsetting effects, is to increase slightly adolescent human capital.

Bibliography Citation

Cosconati, Marco. Parenting Style and the Development of Human Capital in Children. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, June 2009..

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Criminal involvement is non-randomly distributed across individuals and across groups. Debate regarding the etiology of differences in criminal involvement remains. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the current study examined latent class membership in the probability of arrest over a 15-year time span starting when participants were 12-16 years-old and ending when they were 28-31 years-old. Latent class regressions were employed to prospectively investigate whether various demographic and criminological risk factors from the base wave could predict class membership. Models were also estimated separately by sex and by race to identify potentially important differences and consistencies in class structure and risk prediction.

Results from the latent class growth analyses resulted in two to three classes characterized by an abstainer group, an adolescent-limited group, and a stable moderate-level chronic group. In general, being male, increased substance use, and increased delinquency were consistent predictors of class membership. Regarding race and sex differences, being a minority was moderately related to class membership in males but was not significant for females. Being male was a very strong predictor of class membership for Black and Hispanic participants but a relatively weak predictor for White participants. Overall, results supported a general risk factor perspective over a gender or race specific risk perspective. Across race, sex, and cohort, self-reported delinquency was the strongest risk predictor of class membership, suggesting that differential arrest probability is predominantly explained by differential involvement in delinquent behavior.

Household Income, Economic Pressure, and Depressive Mood among Unmarried Women in Midlife: The Moderating Effects of Locus of Control, Financial Instrumental Support Received From Parents, and Race
Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Human Environmental Sciences: Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. DAI-A 69/12, Jun 2009
Cohort(s):
Young Women
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Depression (see also CESD); Household Income; Locus of Control (see Rotter Scale); Racial Differences; Women

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This investigation uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women to replicate studies identifying the associations among household income, economic pressure, and depressive mood in an economically diverse, national sample of white and black unmarried (never married, divorced, separated, and widowed) women in midlife. The study also examines the effects of locus of control and financial instrumental support received from parents on the associations among these economic and psychological measures and explores how these relationships might vary as a function of women's race. Because women's physical health in midlife is associated strongly with depressive mood, the study examines these relationships net of the effects of women's self-rated physical health.

Results of structural equation modeling suggest that economic pressure fully mediated the negative association between household income and women's depressive mood. However, no moderating effects were observed. For both white and black women, the effects of economic pressure on depressive mood did not vary according to women's locus of control or receipt of financial instrumental support from their parents. Additionally, women's locus of control was not associated with higher-order moderation of the effects of receiving financial instrumental support from parents.

Bibliography Citation

Craig, Debra Lynde. Household Income, Economic Pressure, and Depressive Mood among Unmarried Women in Midlife: The Moderating Effects of Locus of Control, Financial Instrumental Support Received From Parents, and Race. Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Human Environmental Sciences: Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. DAI-A 69/12, Jun 2009.

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Poor health, lack of insurance coverage, and medical debt may be key factors underlying the rise of personal bankruptcy in the United States. However, research on the connections between health and personal bankruptcy is limited. Moreover, research has yet to explore the relationship between family bankruptcy and the health and mental health of dependent children. The goal of this thesis is to address these gaps in our understanding of bankruptcy and scaffold future research and policy efforts. Chapter I provides background on bankruptcy in the US and introduces a theoretical context for the topic of bankruptcy emphasizing life course and social ecological frameworks. Chapter II describes the characteristics of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult Cohort (NLSCYA) which provided the data source for the analyses. Chapter III presents the results multiple logistic regression models which seek to identify if and to what extent health factors are associated with bankruptcy filings over a twenty-year period while considering an array of potentially relevant covariates. Chapter IV furthers the analysis through the use of Cox regression models to account for the time-dependent and dynamic nature of life events (e.g. unemployment, health changes, and familial shifts). Chapter V considers the relationships between family bankruptcy and children's health and mental health using multi-state Markov models to compare the intensity of transitions into (and out of) health and mental health states for children in bankrupt and non-bankrupt households. The results of these analyses indicate that several health factors (e.g. smoking, obesity, and depressive symptomology) are associated with an increased hazard of declaring bankruptcy while health insurance coverage is associated with a lower hazard of bankruptcy. Several sociodemographic characteristics are also associated with bankruptcy. Finally, the relative hazard of a child being
indicated for an emotional or behavioral problem is 56% higher for children in a family where bankruptcy is declared (HR: 1.56; 95% CI: 1.10 - 2.19). In contrast, relative hazard of a family-level bankruptcy is 56% higher in families where a child is indicated as having an activity limitation (HR: 1.56; 95% CI: 1.06 - 2.29).

Bibliography Citation

Creswell, Paul D. Personal Bankruptcy and the Health of Families and Children. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014.

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Organizations with low job satisfaction among their employees typically have high turnover rates and poor morale. Research on job satisfaction has focused mainly on organizational factors, but has failed to examine certain employee factors such as generational differences. Recently, the impact of generational differences in the workplace has been increasingly discussed with little empirical evidence. The social information processing theory (SIP) argues that generations form similar attitudes based on shared experiences, which could explain differences in job satisfaction. The purpose of this nonexperimental quantitative study was to determine if Baby Boomers and Generation X display different levels of job satisfaction from a SIP perspective. The research questions for the study examined the effect of generations and occupations on job satisfaction as examined by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. A 2X4 ANOVA was used to examine the main effect of generation, the main effect of occupation on job satisfaction, and the interaction effect of generation by occupation. There were statistically significant main effects for generation on job satisfaction and for occupation on job satisfaction. The interaction effect of generation and occupation on job satisfaction was not significant. The results indicate that generations and occupations do affect job satisfaction and additional research is needed to understand why there are differences. The implications for positive social change include a better understanding of generations in the workplace and their effect on job satisfaction and organizational success. If organizations can adopt organizational factors to satisfy different generations, the findings suggest that they may be able to reduce turnover and decrease hiring and training expenses as a result of increased job satisfaction.

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This dissertation contributes toward our understanding of health disparities by examining how stress, namely underemployment, over the life course affects mental and physical health outcomes. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study employs conditional latent class models with distal health outcomes to render life course trajectories of underemployment spanning a 10-year period, as well as antecedent life course pathways originating in childhood, and the health consequences at mid-adulthood. More specifically, a multinomial logistic regression function is used to relate the underemployment latent class categorical. variable to covariates; and, linear, logistic, and zero-inflated Poisson regression functions are used to relate the health outcomes to the underemployment latent class trajectories and covariates.

The results suggest that approximately one-third of women and one-fourth of men belong to trajectories, or latent classes, characterized by chronic moderate levels of underemployment over the adult life course. In addition, various trajectories revealed the multifarious nature of stress by demonstrating unique patterns of severity, duration, timing, and sequencing of underemployment. Findings confirmed past positive associations between underemployment and being African American or having lower education levels. And, of principal interest in this dissertation, results demonstrated that membership in worse underemployment trajectories was generally associated with higher levels of depression and worse self-rated health, but not binge drinking or chronic conditions at mid-adulthood for women and men.

Furthermore, the results suggest that a cumulative process is at play whereby adverse childhood conditions, including lower parental education and several measures of family and other disadvantages, operate by impeding educational attainment and/or increasing the odds of membership in a higher-risk underemployment tra
jectory, which ultimately harms health. There is also evidence that those who have higher levels of baseline depression are disproportionately selected into worse underemployment trajectories.

Ultimately, these findings indicate that the underemployed must be disaggregated from the employed in future research, whether employment status is the focus of interest or a control variable. They also highlight the need to theoretically and methodologically engage the dynamic nature of stress, as well as situate stress in a life course framework whereby heterogeneous pathways over the life course originating in childhood are examined.

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The purpose of the present longitudinal investigation was to examine (a) whether and how individual parenting constructs (age 8-9) from both the coercion theory and the general theory of crime were associated with the development of self-control (age 12-13) and deviance (age 16-17), and (b) whether self-control mediated the relation between parenting and deviance. Data were drawn from 736 mother and child participants via questionnaires and observations during three time periods. Child participants were split almost evenly by sex (males: n = 369, females: n = 367).

Results indicated that an overall parenting construct characterized by parenting variables from both theories was associated with self-control and deviance. Further evidence indicated that parenting and self-control additively explained more variance in the engagement of deviance rather than self-control mediating the link. Finally, results indicated that deviance was best explained when three measures of self-control (i.e., ages 8-9, 12-13, and 16-17) were added to the model along with effective parenting.

Overall, results allude to the importance of examining parenting constructs as described by both the general theory of crime and the coercion theory. Further, self-control was found to be important in the explanation of deviance.

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In the first essay, I analyze the effect of minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) laws on non-cognitive skills. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) is used to investigate the effect of changes in MLDA on the onset of regular drinking, self-esteem and self-control. Surprisingly, I find that a legal drinking environment is associated with an increase in self-esteem for females in the short-run and long-run. Then, I test several possible channels through which self-esteem may be indirectly affected by the MLDA. These channels include alcohol and drug use, marriage, sex and childbirth. Although the MLDA has a significant effect on some of these channels for females, using the channels as controls in the self-esteem analysis does not affect the magnitude or significance of the effect of the MLDA on female self-esteem.

Bibliography Citation

Crouch, Randall. Essays on Drug and Alcohol Policies in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Houston, 2015.

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Conventional wisdom is that depression lowers productivity. The magnitude of this effect has been of interest to economists and other social scientists. In this dissertation I take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to investigate the effects from a dynamic perspective and to control for unobserved heterogeneity in a fixed effects framework. Exploiting that the dataset provides information about depressive symptoms in multiple years, I am able to study how changes in depressive symptoms impact productivity. My results suggest that personality matters to a great extent. While ordinary least squares results render a strong negative significant effect to depressive symptoms, taking unobserved personal characteristics into account shows that people who enter a depressive spell will not lose productivity and those who come out of a depressive spell will not be more productive either. Due to the limited cohort in the NLSY79, the results may not be generalizable to older populations or to individuals in their early 20s.

Health insurance mandates have become increasingly popular with policy makers as an alternative to public provision of health insurance benefits. In this paper I analyze the effects of state mental health parity mandates in the labor market and in the insurance market. Theory suggests that health insurance mandates could increase employers' costs and potentially reduce employer provided health insurance, and/or lower wages. States passed parity mandates throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, however, self-insured health insurance plans are not subject to these state regulations. Therefore, I estimate the effect of state mental health parity laws by assigning probability values of being subject to these state parity mandates - that is, probability values of being in a non-self-insured health plan - to each respondent in the Current Population Survey based on firm size, industry and year. These probability values are constructed using information on eligibility and, self-insured plans in the Employer Health Benefits Survey. Results provide no evidence that parity mandates increased the number of people uninsured. Findings on the impact on wages are not conclusive since coefficients seem to be sensitive to changes in the sample.

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This dissertation explores financial behavior outcomes based on economic, relational, and behavioral characteristics within marriages and individually. Data for the three essays are obtained from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult (1986-2008) survey.

Essay one examined the determinants of money arguments within marriage utilizing Lundberg and Pollak's (1994) theory of non-cooperative game theory. Respondents' negative financial behaviors, higher income, and birth order (being laterborn) were found to influence a greater frequency of money arguments.

Essay two examined the predictors of individuals' financial behaviors, specifically socialization characteristics and gender role attitudes (traditional versus non-traditional). Using a theoretical framework of gender role theory (Eagly, 1987), younger age, not being married, being non-Black, non-Hispanic, being males, and having higher income were all found to be predictive of at least of one of the three financial behaviors used in this study.

Finally, using a theoretical framework of Becker's (1993) theory of human capital, essay three explored the intergenerational transfer of attitudes and human capital across two generations and their possible link to the respondents' financial behaviors. Results showed that mothers' enhanced human capital, endowed and attained, and nontraditional gender role attitudes have a significant positive impact on the children's financial behaviors. Respondents' income was also found to be significant.

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This dissertation uses panel data to quantitatively assess the effects of college completion and elite college attendance on individual labor market outcomes during the Great Recession (2007-09). The effects of the Great Recession, the most protracted and severe economic downturn experienced in the U.S. since World War II, were felt unevenly across levels of educational attainment. After controlling for observable precollege variables such as cognitive ability, socioeconomic and demographic background, and high school experiences, substantial treatment effects of college completion remained during the Great Recession, though these were heterogeneous across the type of outcome and across individuals. Disadvantaged individuals benefitted the most from college completion on measures of employment, while more advantaged individuals benefitted greatest from college on measures of job quality. Furthermore, comparing effects of college among young workers who experienced expansionary economic contexts to those who experienced recessionary contexts showed that the patterns of effects described above were specific to recessionary contexts. Thus, experiencing a recessionary context led to an increase in the effect of college on employment among those least likely to complete college, and an increase in the effect of college on job quality for those most likely to complete college, conditional on employment. These results are consistent with the job competition model of the labor market, which utilizes a labor queue and predicts occupational downgrading at the top of the labor queue and crowding out of employment near the bottom of the labor queue. A similar hypothesis was not supported for the effects of elite college attendance during the Great Recession. The findings of this dissertation suggest that the economic context interacts with the effects of educational attainment on individual labor market outcomes in uneven ways, producing a unique constellation of education effects according to the economic context. Therefore, fluctuations in the business cycle can contribute to the stratification of individuals by affecting their labor market outcomes directly, but also by affecting the relationships between preexisting individual characteristics, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Curry, Matthew K. The Great Recession and the Effects of Higher Education. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2016.

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Panel data collected on youth ages 18 to 31 via The Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children (IPSPC), youth ages 14 to 45 via the NLSY79, and youth ages 14 to 25 via the NLSY97 are used to assess the following research questions: (1) Do fertility intentions for childless, small, average, and large family size emerge in adolescence or earlier? (2) To what extent do family-of-origin, demographic, and individual factors differentially predict family size fertility intentions? (3) How persistent are fertility intentions and does stability differ as a function of family size intentions, especially for those who intend permanent childlessness?

Bibliography Citation

Dariotis, Jacinda K. Family Formation Intentions from Adolescence to Middle Adulthood: Emergence, Persistence, and Process. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Pennsylvania State University, October 2005.

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In the third essay, I examine the effect of working on grades and credit completion for undergraduate students in the United States and provide some of the first estimates of the effect of working on the academic performance on part-time students. I use student-level fixed effects models to control for permanent hard-to-measure and unobserved characteristics and also analyze the relationship between availability of financial resources, working, and academic performance through an instrumental variables approach. Results indicate that full-time students' grades and credit completion appear to be at most mildly harmed by increasing work hours, but I find little evidence of a detrimental impact of working for part-time students.

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This dissertation consists of two chapters, each of them containing an essay that is related to the effects of parental choices on aggregate inequality and intergenerational mobility.

The first chapter, "Explaining Income Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility: The Role of Fertility and Family Transfers," studies the effect of fertility differences across income groups on inequality and mobility. Poor families have more children and transfer less resources to them. This suggests that family decisions about fertility and transfers increase income inequality and dampen intergenerational mobility. To evaluate the quantitative importance of this mechanism, we extend the standard heterogeneous-agent life-cycle model with earnings risk and credit constraints to allow for endogenous fertility, family transfers, and education. The model, estimated to the US in the 2000s, implies that a counterfactual flat income-fertility profile would---through the equalization of initial conditions---reduce intergenerational persistence by 13% and income inequality by about 4%. The impact of a counterfactual constant transfer per child is twice as large.

Bibliography Citation

Daruich, Diego. Essays in Inequality and Family Economics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, New York University, 2018.

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This dissertation is a collection of three papers that examines different aspects of public finance and policy. In particular, it looks at the choices made governments about their debt composition structure and their expenditure composition and how it affects their economic performance performance. Finally it looks at the issue of digital divide and how home computers might add to human capital formation and thus help in the economic growth of a country.
The first chapter develops a theoretical model to analyze the optimal choice between bank loans and bond finance for a sovereign debtor. The model describes a market that is subject to moral hazard and adverse selection. We model the choice between the two debt instruments allowing for debt renegotiation in the event of financial distress and the possibility of default. It incorporates the possibility of private monitoring by the banks and public monitoring by the credit rating agencies. We derive the choice of debt instrument with their associated maturity structure endogenously. We find that the reduced cost of information dissemination and large crisis costs have increased the willingness of the sovereigns to get themselves publicly monitored and made it easy for the countries to participate in the bond market. The choice between bank loans and bond finance is thus determined endogenously by the trade-off between two deadweight costs: the crisis cost of a sovereign default and the cost of debtor moral hazard. In equilibrium, sovereigns use bank loans for financing short-term projects and issue long-term bonds for projects crisis costs are large.

The second chapter is an empirical analysis of public expenditure composition and economic growth. Many countries have adopted across-the-board cuts in the course of reform programs that are not desirable from the efficiency and equity perspectives, nor are they sustainable over time. For these countries, releasing resources for critical public programs and securing fiscal adjustment is absolutely necessary. We do a cross-country comparison to find out the productive and unproductive components of government expenditures and assess whether a change in the composition would have positive growth effects. We conclude that the composition-mix has different effects on growth for countries at different stages of development. There is a threshold effect for some categories of expenditure and so management of these resources is very important.

In the third chapter, we discuss issues whether eliminating the digital divide and providing home computers is a way for human capital formation for countries. Although computers are universal in the classroom, nearly twenty million children in the United States do not have computers in their homes. There is a big role of home computers in the educational protect and thus human capital formation. Home computers might be very useful for completing school assignments, but they might also represent a distraction for teenagers. We use several identification strategies and panel data from the two main U.S. datasets that include recent information on computer ownership among children--the 2000-2003 CPS Computer and Internet Use Supplements (CIUS) matched to the CPS Basic Monthly Files and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997--to explore the causal relationship between computer ownership and high school graduation and other educational outcomes. Teenagers who have access to home computers are 6 to 8 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than teenagers who do not have home computers after controlling for individual, parental, and family characteristics. We generally find evidence of positive relationships between home computers and educational outcomes using several identification strategies, including controlling for typically unobservable home environment and extracurricular activities in the NLSY97, fixed effects models, instrumental variables and including future computer ownership and falsification tests. Home computers may increase high school graduation by reducing non-productive activities, such as truancy and crime, among children in addition to making it easier to complete school assignments.

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Evidence show that there exist disparities in educational attainment levels between Whites and the minorities. In general, African Americans and Hispanics attain lower levels of education than Whites while Asians, on average have educational levels that even surpass the Whites.

Whites and different minority groups approach their education in different ways due to their upbringing and differences in culture. The aim of this research is to investigate the role of family income and family background characteristics on educational attainment of individuals. This analysis focuses on grade 9 completion, high school graduation, and college enrollment behavior for both males and females by ethnicity/race. In particular, this study compares the schooling attainment behavior of Asians with the other three ethnic/racial groups. Variables related to family income, family background, cognitive ability, and income returns to education are studied to see their effect on the schooling choices of Asians and how that compares to Whites and the other minority groups over time, as it is important to determine and understand the factors that primarily contribute to the outstanding educational success of Asians. The educational attainment models are estimated using Probit method with the data taken from three different sources namely NLSY97, CPS (1980 and 2000) and Census (1980 and 2000).

The results show that the influence of Asian mothers' schooling on their child's education is substantially lower than the mothers from the other three ethnic/racial groups and this could possibly be due to their higher overall expectations for their children compared to the other three groups, as the sole interest of Asian parents lie in their child's education and academic accomplishments. Family income has a positive and significant influence on achieving education for all racial/ethnic groups in 1980 and 2000. The effect decreases in most cases from 1980 to 2000 for all groups which could suggest less reliance on family income and availability of other sources of financing education and also increased importance of attaining higher levels of education. Income returns to education has a greater impact on grade 9 and high school completion for both Blacks and Hispanics in most cases compared to Whites and Asians, suggesting higher educational and earnings aspirations for the latter two groups.

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Much of a worker's successes is governed by two types of constraints: (a) worker's innate abilities, and (b) policies that limit worker's labor market opportunities. Workers with a higher endowment of abilities tend to perform better than ones with lower endowments. For example, studies show that workers with higher AFQT (a measure for ability) attain higher schooling and enjoy higher earnings. Similarly, workers in a well-managed labor market enjoy better career opportunities than in badly managed ones. For example, workers in a well-managed market incur lower search costs, and experience shorter spells of unemployment than ones working in a badly managed markets. Thus, understanding these constraints and their effects are crucial for effective policymaking. The essays in this dissertation address topics related to these constraints. The first looks into the way economists handle abilities. The second examines the link between non-cognitive skills (stress tolerance and stress resilience) and occupational choices. The third examines the intended and unintended effects of policy on young women's labor market outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Das, Tirthatanmoy. Essays on Cognitive Skills, Non-cognitive Skills, Government Policy, and Labor Market Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2012.

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Chapter 3 utilizes matched data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY79) and Children and Young Adults (NLSY79 CYA), to estimate the impact of mothers' self-esteem on young children's home environment qualities that enhance early childhood cognitive functioning and extend better emotional support. The estimates suggest that mothers with higher self-esteem provide better home environment to their children during early stages of childhood. The results are robust across different estimation methods, empirical specifications, and demographic groups. This study also finds that mothers with higher self-esteem are more likely to engage in parental practices that support young children's cognitive and emotional development. Further analysis shows that mothers' self-esteem has a causal relationship with cognitive and behavioral outcomes of school-age children. The results obtained in this study indicate that early childhood development policies directed towards enhancement of non-cognitive skills in mothers can improve children's human capital outcomes.

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The purpose of this quantitative research with a correlational design was to determine whether a relationship exists between the increase in federal student loan funding and the increase in wage inequality among college-educated workers in the United States after controlling for wage differences among occupations and labor force composition. Based upon Mincer's model of human capital accumulation, the skill biased technological change model, and studies showing tuition incentives provide a disincentive to student effort and reduce human capital accumulation in college, this study explored whether federal student loan funding behaved as a tuition subsidy in this model. Two research questions guided this study: 1) Is there a significant relationship between federal student loan funding and wage inequality among college-educated workers? 2) Is there a significant relationship between federal student loan funding and wage inequality among college-educated workers after controlling for wage differences among occupations and labor force composition? The study relied upon public secondary data retrieved from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 and 1997 for a large, diverse sample with specific individuals observed repeatedly over time.

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This dissertation investigates the influence of maternal health behaviors on her child’s
health behaviors later in life. Utilizing longitudinal data that follows both mother and child
throughout their lives allows for maternal and child health behaviors to be studied noncontemporaneously.
This is the first study to explore the causal relationship between both
maternal smoking in her child’s childhood and future child smoking, as well as maternal alcohol
use (abuse) and future child alcohol use (abuse).

The first chapter provides an introduction to the health behaviors and other maternal
influences discussed in this dissertation. It is important to model the subject’s childhood
accurately to account for childhood factors that could affect future decision making. After
controlling for the subject’s childhood environment, the researcher can see the direct impact of
maternal health behaviors on her child’s future health decisions. The health behaviors at
interest in this study are cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and binge drinking. There is an
intuitive link between parental, here only maternal, behaviors and child behaviors. The real
question is if the child, the subject, sees this influence as a positive or a negative in future
decision-making. The unique design of this study measures maternal health behaviors during
the subject’s childhood, aged birth through 15, and subject health behaviors later in life, aged
16 and older.

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The record volume of immigration to the United States in the past four decades coupled with dramatic changes in the characteristics of the foreign-born population have contributed to widespread interest in the social adjustment and economic consequences of the newest Americans. This dissertation addresses these issues by examining contextual and policy predictors of fertility and fertility-related behavior for U.S. immigrants using data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, the 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Series, and the Vital Statistics Natality Detail Files. Immigrant fertility is an important topic of research because it serves both as an indicator of how well immigrants have assimilated to native norms along a fundamental dimension and as a barometer of growth in a distinct and increasingly salient U.S. population.

Chapter 1 looks at cohort and generation differences in levels and predictors of early fertility and sex among first, second, and third-plus generation young adults in the U.S. during the late 1970s and 1990s. The analyses seek to determine (1) how this behavior has changed by generation and arrival cohort and (2) what family and community factors predict these outcomes for immigrants. The study finds that first-generation immigrant youth exhibit the lowest levels of early fertility and sex, negatively assimilating by the third-plus generation. The findings suggest a positive association between arrival cohort early sex only. Further, the research fails to uncover significant predictors of these outcomes among first and second generation immigrants although the measures used have long been associated with them in the general population--suggesting that protective effects of generation reflect unmeasured cultural and social mechanisms.

Chapter 2 examines whether welfare policy changes occurring in the 1990s altered fertility outcomes for low-educated and unmarried foreign-born women. The study also looks at whether welfare reform had unintended consequences on immigrant women, like reducing prenatal care or decreasing the fertility of welfare-eligible or non-welfare dependent women through "chilling effects." The results show no consistent evidence that welfare policy changed fertility behavior among any immigrant group and raises doubt concerning the usefulness of targeting women's childbearing decisions with economic incentives.

Bibliography Citation

Deleone, Felicia Yang. Contextual and Policy Predictors of Early Fertility and Sex in the United States Immigrant Population. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 2008.

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In this dissertation, I analyze the consequences of occupational self-selection in a labor market with moral hazard and asymmetric information. I provide a structural estimation of a shirking model with occupational self-selection and investigate how well it explains the differences in wages and dismissal rates observed in white collar and blue collar occupations. This dissertation consists of two papers. In the first paper, I present a structural model of occupational self-selection in a labor market characterized by asymmetric information and moral hazard. The model demonstrates that in such a labor market, when making occupational choices, workers take into account their probability of shirking and the monitoring intensity in each occupation. The estimation results, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, find evidence of occupational self-selection in the labor market such that the distribution of worker abilities in an occupation differs in a systematic way from the distribution in the population as a whole. Furthermore, self-selection of workers significantly contributes to the differences in dismissal rates and wages across occupations. In particular, the results of this paper show that workers' self-selection leads to higher wages and lower dismissal rates in the white collar occupation and lower wages and higher dismissal rates in the blue collar occupation compared to an economy in which workers are randomly assigned to occupations.

In the second paper, I consider three extensions to the original self-selection model presented in Chapter 3. Workers are assumed to accumulate human capital and experience dismissals that are exogenous to their behavior. Results suggest that adding human capital accumulation to the original model enhances the model's fit to the white collar wage data but worsens its fit to observed dismissal rates in both occupations. The model that includes both human capital accumulation and exogenous dismissals explain the observed wage and dismissal dynamics the best. Human capital accumulation is responsible for most of the wage growth observed in the white collar occupation whereas the direct effect of human capital on the blue collar wage growth is not substantial.

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This dissertation consists of three essays on the relationship between mother's employment and educational status and child's cognitive, non-cognitive, overweight, and nutritional status outcomes. The first essay uses data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and examines the impacts of mother's introhousehold bargaining power on child's cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. The empirical results suggest that parents' introhousehold bargaining power does affect resource allocation within households and in turn affect children's cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. The second essay examines the relationship between maternal labor supply and childhood overweight by applying the Stein-rule shrinkage estimator by using data from the panel study of income dynamics (PSID) and 1997 childhood development supplement (CDS) from the PSID. The empirical results show that a mother's average working hours in previous year has significant effect on her child's BMI in single-parent family and girl groups. The third essay exploits longitudinal data to study children's nutritional status determinants especially the role of mothers' schooling in China. The empirical results suggest that the determinants differ significantly across rural and urban areas. In rural areas, mothers' years of schooling appears to be a major determinant of children's long-run health status.

Bibliography Citation

Deng, Xian. Three Essays on the Relationships Between Mothers' Education and Employment Status and Children's Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Irvine, January 2007. DAI-A 67/07, Jan 2007.

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Parents' education, and in particular, mother's education is shown to have a positive effect on their children's outcomes. However, questions on its causality, channels by which the effect transmits and the relative importance of each parent's education still remain. These issues are very important from a policy standpoint. In this dissertation, we address them using children between the ages of 5 and 14 from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-79) and its Child Supplement (CNLSY).

We decompose the causal effects of maternal education into direct and indirect channels. Ours is the first study on intergenerational returns to education to do this decomposition. We utilize child fixed effects to account for endogeneity of maternal schooling and other inputs due to unobserved time invarying characteristics. Hausman tests indicate that fixed effects are indeed needed. Our results show that an additional year of mother's schooling causally increases Math and Reading test scores and reduces a child's risk of being overweight. Additionally, direct effects of maternal education are more important for Math, Reading and probability of a child at risk of being overweight; while indirect effects are more important for Behavioral problems. Lastly, we find that role of the father figure in the family differs by family structure. In families where father is the biological father, mother's education is equally important as the father's. However, when father isn't biological, mother's education is more important for behavioral outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Dey, Ishita. Impact of Parental Education on Children's Development. Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2010..

Early Alcohol Use and Timing of Sexual and Reproductive Onset
Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Education, Indiana University, 2016
Cohort(s):
NLSY97
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Age at First Birth; Age at First Intercourse; Alcohol Use; Gender Differences

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This dissertation is the first-known study to document associations between timing of first alcohol use and onset of sex and reproduction in males, including examination of differences by respondent sex. Using Problem Behavior Theory (PBT) as a guiding framework, survival analyses were conducted to examine relationships between age at first drink of alcohol and ages at first sex and first childbirth, and transition from first sex to childbirth. Data were drawn from 8,984 males and females from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), a nationally-representative sample of respondents born between 1980-1984.

Bibliography Citation

Doran, Kelly A. Early Alcohol Use and Timing of Sexual and Reproductive Onset. Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Education, Indiana University, 2016.

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In this dissertation, I explore how gender inequality-generating processes unfold across the life course and how these processes vary across women. In three stand-alone empirical chapters exploring related themes, I pay specific attention to variation in the effects of gender and motherhood by women's educational attainment. I show that gender and motherhood have heterogeneous effects by education and by other demographic characteristics including race, parity, and fertility timing. I also consider how and why labor force outcomes vary by race, fertility timing, and parity within education groups. By highlighting and identifying variation in processes and effects across groups and across the life course, my findings add nuance to the conversation on women's labor market trajectories.

Bibliography Citation

Doren, Catherine. Three Essays on the Effects of Gender and Motherhood on Labor Force Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2018.

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Multiple partner fertility (or MPF) is a pervasive and durable component of American family life, with 1 in 5 women--and nearly 1 in 4 mothers--having children with two or more men during their lifetime; and, these women tend to fare worse than their single partner fertility counterparts in terms of lower mental and physical health and higher rates of depression. Further, MPF households are more likely than other households to be characterized by single parenthood, poverty, and low parental education and underemployment. Using a life course perspective and social stress theories as a guide, I provide evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979-2006 which suggests that MPF represents a theoretically important constellation of events that have the potential to disrupt day-to-day life, change family roles, create ambiguity, and introduce chronic stressors into the home that are associated with significant declines in maternal well being over the long-term. This project also considers whether having multiple partner fertility makes women more vulnerable to stressful life experiences. Overall, there was little support of differential vulnerability hypothesis, however, there were several significant interactions which provided surprising results. For example, as the number of residential partners increased, women with single partner fertility saw larger declines in mental health than women with multiple partner fertility. Likewise, single partner fertility mothers were more likely than multiple partner fertility mothers to see declines in physical health as time in poverty increased, and saw fewer gains in mental health and depression as time employed increased. Similarly, among MPF women, Hispanic and African American mothers had higher levels of physical health, mental health, and depression than White mothers. Although these findings were unexpected, they were not without precedent in other literatures, and they provide an important new framework for understanding serial parents who face cumulative disadvantages.

Bibliography Citation

Dorius, Cassandra J. Does Serial Parenting Harm Women over the Long Run? The Link between Multiple Partner Fertility and Women's Mental and Physical Health at Midlife. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2010.

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During the late 1970s, black women not only reached parity, but in some circumstances, made greater hourly wages than white women with similar characteristics. Between 1980 and 2002, however, the black-white median wage gap among women tripled, approaching 22 percent by 2002. In this dissertation, I evaluate possible explanations for this marked growth including factors unique to women such as changing labor force participation, group occupational upgrading, and family structure, and factors related to broad-scale changes in the labor market. Chiefly, I ask whether the growth in inequality was due to white women's broad occupational improvement or whether black women were increasingly forced into "bad jobs."

In this dissertation, I use both Current Population Survey data and National Longitudinal Survey data to compare black women's and white women's wages between 1980 and 2002. I examine general trends using summary statistics, then employ linear regression and relative distribution methods to examine the relative effect of human capital and job characteristics on women's wages. In addition, I develop synthetic wage trajectories to examine the wage growth of women over their twenties based on educational attainment.

Taken together, the analyses in this dissertation show that broad industrial restructuring resulted in an "office economy," providing women with greater opportunity that coincided with their increased labor force participation and educational attainment. Women disproportionately moved into managerial and professional occupations relative to the total population, but white women reaped greater benefits from this move. Although black women experienced wage growth, their overrepresentation in the service industry and worsening relative wages as professionals, managers, and sales workers increasingly disadvantaged them. In addition, NLS data indicate that black degree holders had flatter wage trajectories over their twenties in 1991 relative to 1980, thus even the most advantaged black women suffered losses during the 1980s.

To date, most analyses regarding wage inequality among women have limitations including focusing on estimating the effects of changing selection into the labor force and restricting the sample to young women. This broad, descriptive analysis provides a foundation for future research examining the accumulating disadvantage of black women workers relative to white women.

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This dissertation is the first-known study to document longitudinal associations between BMI and subsequent RSBs among adolescents, including examination of racial/ethnic differences. Using Economic Rationality Theory (ERT) and Life Course Theory as compatible guiding frameworks, latent growth curve modeling was conducted to examine relationships between BMI prospectively assessed from childhood through adolescence and engagement in subsequent RSBs, including early sex, multiple sexual partners, unprotected sex, and/or casual sex. Data were drawn from 8,095 Hispanic, Black, and White/other females and males from Children of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a longitudinal study of biological children of women participating in a large-nationally representative sample of individuals aged 14-22 in 1979.

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Using theoretical constructs of the human capital theory (Schultz, 1959) and the resource-based view of the firm (Barney, 1991), this study examines whether the type of education completed has an impact on an individual's choice between self-employment and employment with a firm. In addition, this study seeks to understand the geographic location selection for those who choose self-employment. Data from the National Longitudinal Youth Study, 1979-2010, are used to test two hypotheses. The first is whether an individual with a vocational/technical education versus a college education is more likely to become self-employed. The second is whether individuals choosing self-employment are more likely to locate their businesses in the immediate geographic area of their residence or away from their home area. Using logistic regression, the study does not find support for either of the hypotheses. Testing of data from additional surveys to confirm these findings with other data is suggested to eliminate possible biases due to the characteristics of the data collected. Future researchers should consider adding type of education to their testing. Researchers should also consider including information about the generation that completed the survey. In addition, researchers may find added value in measuring attitudes concerning employment with a firm versus self-employment along with attitudes about attending vocational/technical education versus receiving a college education.

Bibliography Citation

Edenborg, Michelle D. The Effect of Type of Education on an Individual's Self Employment Choice: Comparison of Vocational and College Education. Ph.D. Dissertation, St. Ambrose University, 2013.

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In the first chapter I analyze the degree to which flextime reduces fertility-related career interruptions. In particular, I ask whether women with flextime return to work sooner and remain employed when they have young children. I quantify the resulting reduction in the earnings penalty from periods of non-employment due to child-care responsibilities. To answer this question, I develop a dynamic discrete choice model for the fertility and labor supply decisions of married and cohabiting women. The model allows flextime to directly affect preferences, the arrival rate of job offers and offered wages. I estimate the model using a sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The estimates suggest a small positive willingness to pay for flextime in a full-time job among the majority of women with no children. Moreover, a woman values flextime more strongly as her number of children increases or if she has an infant. Her willingness to pay for flextime if she has one infant child rises to 8% of full-time earnings. If flextime were available to all women with infant children, on average fertility increases by 0.6 children. The number of quarters of full-time work with flextime increases yet participation falls and full-time work experience declines by roughly 1.5 years. As a result, potential wages at age 35 fall by 2.5%. The net effect is a modest welfare improvement of up to 1.3%.

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The third essay examines the effect of neighborhood gangs on youth criminal behavior in the United States. It uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and examines the effect of neighborhood gangs on youth delinquency and substance use. The essay finds that neighborhood gangs positively affect incidences of substance use by youths after accounting for individual heterogeneity. This finding suggests that policies providing early guidance to youths about the effects of neighborhood gangs should be encouraged. Youths exposed to neighborhood gangs should be sensitized on the dangers of substance use.

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This thesis investigates how individual characteristics, such as ability and family background, affect non-monetary returns to education. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that the effect of education on general health and criminal behavior is much larger for people with low ability and those with a relatively disadvantaged family background. A simple extended version of Card's (1995) formulation of Becker's (1967) model of optimal schooling is presented and used to analyze the main implications of these results for investment in education. In light of the evidence on the positive relationship between monetary returns to education and both individuals' ability and environmental factors, my estimates suggest that for less able people non-monetary gains are a major component of the total return to education. From a social point of view, since the reductions in criminal behavior are larger among less able people, these results cast some doubt on policy proposals which, for efficiency, advocate investing more in the more able. This thesis also shows that the ability bias in least square estimates of the return to schooling may be attenuated or even reversed once heterogeneity in non-monetary returns to schooling is incorporated into the analysis.

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This study focused on maternal education and two important dimensions of parenting, maternal emotional and cognitive support predicting achievement. Using latent growth curve modeling to analyze data (N = 6,166) from the Children of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth79, the study examined whether maternal education and cognitive and emotional support during early childhood--ages 6, 7, and 8--predicted math and reading achievement during the transition to early adolescence, ages 9 to 14. Maternal emotional support was hypothesized to moderate the relations between maternal cognitive support and the development of reading and math achievement. Education, cognitive and emotional support predicted reading achievement at age 9 and changes in reading achievement to age 14. Education, cognitive and emotional support predicted math achievement at age 9 and education and cognitive support predicted changes in math achievement. There were no interactions between emotional and cognitive support predicting achievement, however there was a non-significant trend such that if emotional support was low, then the relation between cognitive support and growth in math achievement was reduced. The study sample included European-Americans (50%), Latinos (21%), and African-Americans (29%). There were no significant interactions when the model was tested separately for each ethnic-racial group.

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Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study will seek evidence that support or refute the notion that parents' educational attainment level is the strongest predictor of their children's likelihood of engaging in violent juvenile behavior (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012).
This study examines the relationship between family, community and school related risk factors conducive to the development of juvenile violence. This study consist of two parts: The first aim of this quantitative, correlational study is to examine the component elements (adolescent drug use, low educational attainment, poverty) of family dysfunction and compare correlations between each element with the criminal conduct of four groups of juveniles (the early starters vs. late starters and the adolescent-limiteds vs. life course persisters) representing different criminal profiles; and the relationship with their parents' educational attainment levels (high school diploma, college degree) to statistically determine the strongest predictor of juvenile violence. The second part of this study is to determine the correlation between parental educational attainment levels (high school diploma, college degree) and component elements (adolescent drug use, parental drug use, low educational attainment, poverty, and marital status) of family dysfunction, and their statistical predictability of juvenile academic failure.

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Community colleges, which are public, two-year institutions of higher education, have become a major provider of education and training that directly leads to a job in a particular occupation. To help community colleges build capacity to provide job training, the federal government has funded several grant programs over the past 15 years. Recent grant programs require the use the career pathways model, a framework for building a sequence of education and training steps that allow students to progressively learn skills and earn credentials, and advance in their careers in a particular occupation. This dissertation assesses the net present value to society of potential federal investments in job training at community colleges, using the career pathway model. It draws from the existing and proposed investments to create a hypothetical community college grant program from which an ex-ante cost-benefit analysis is conducted. Data from national surveys and previous studies are used to estimate the costs and benefits. Results show that the net present value to society is a net benefit over the life of the investment, mainly driven by earnings gains of students who attended job training at community colleges. To ensure federal investments in job training at community colleges are highly cost-beneficial, policymakers considering providing funding for similar efforts should require colleges to implement job training approaches that show some evidence that they can accelerate learning, and improve students' labor market outcomes through better connections to employer demand.

Bibliography Citation

Eyster, Lauren. A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Federal Job Training Investments in Community Colleges. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Public Policy and Administration, George Washington University, 2017.

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In a sample of 921 children in nondivorced families, 230 children in divorced families and 35 children in remarried families assessed at age 10 through age 14, growth modeling was used to determine the basic developmental trajectories of internalizing and externalizing behaviors as well as mother/child attachment bond immediately following a marital transition of divorce or remarriage. I also investigated the effects of gender, mother's education level, and family income as well as all possible two way interactions on these trajectories. The data was obtained from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) data set. The results demonstrated that immediately following the marital transition, early adolescents in divorced and remarried families on average exhibited higher levels of internalizing and externalizing behaviors compared to children in nondivorced families with children in remarried families exhibiting the highest levels. However, by three to four years later children in remarried families had begun exhibiting similar levels of internalizing and externalizing behaviors as children in nondivorced families. Children in recently divorced families began demonstrating similar levels of internalizing behaviors as nondivorced children by four years later but they were still demonstrating higher levels of externalizing behaviors four years after the divorce. Children's behavioral adjustment to divorce and remarriage also significantly differed based on their mother's educational level. The initial effect of divorce and remarriage on adolescent's externalizing behaviors was significantly more prominent at lower education levels than at higher education levels, particularly for children of divorce. The effect of marital status on adolescent's externalizing behaviors over time had the opposite effect at high and low levels of mother's education, with children of divorced and remarried low educated mothers exhibiting a decrease in externalizing behaviors over time while children of divorced and remarried highly educated mothers exhibited an increase in externalizing behaviors. However, this effect was significantly more prominent in children of remarried families. There were no significant changes in mother/child attachment bond following a marital transition of divorce or remarriage but there was a significant negative relationship between mother/child bond and internalizing and externalizing behaviors.

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This dissertation is comprised of three essays. The first essay tests the empirical validity of a statistical discrimination model that incorporates employer's race. I show that if an employer statistically discriminates less against an employee that shares the same race (match) than an employee who does not share the same race (mismatch), then a match employee's wage correlates with measures of skill (AFQT) more than a mismatch employee's wage. Using data from the NLSY97, which includes information about the racial background of employees and their supervisors, I find support for this prediction for young black and white male employees after controlling for sample selection.

The second essay tests whether the theoretic model that explains the racial wage gap can also explain the gender wage gap. Specifically, I test whether the correlation between AFQT and wage is stronger for a employer-employee couple that shares the same gender than for a couple with opposite genders. I find that the data does not support this hypothesis.

Bibliography Citation

Fadlon, Yariv. Essays on Statistical Discrimination and on the Payoff to Publishing in Economics Journals. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University, 2010.

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Sexual risk behaviors among U.S. adolescents is a major public health concern. Adolescents are contracting sexually transmitted diseases at alarming rates. The purpose of this research was to identify factors related to parent-child interactions that influence adolescent sexual behaviors. A combination of attachment theory and family systems theory was used to help explain how adolescent sexual choices (age of sexual debut, use of birth control, use of condoms, multiple sex partners in a 12-month period) are affected by the perceived quality of parent-child interactions (maternal/parental closeness, monitoring, communication, and involvement). Archival data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Survey of Child and Young Adult cohort 1979 (NLSY79) was used for this research. A sample of 11,504 adolescents aged 12 to 19 years, and their biological mothers who participated in the longitudinal survey, was drawn. Nonparametric analyses revealed significant differences in adolescent perceptions of maternal and paternal closeness and maternal perceptions of maternal and paternal closeness. Logistic regression analyses revealed that adolescents' perceptions of parental engagement (maternal and paternal closeness, monitoring, communication, and involvement) significantly affected their sexual choices (age of sexual debut, use of birth control, condoms, and multiple partners). The results of this study can be used to initiate positive social change by informing parents, program developers, and researchers. Developing strategies to guide parents and adolescents to develop positive perceptions of the interactions, closing the gap between adolescent and parental perceptions of interactions, will help reduce adolescent risky sexual behaviors, thereby benefiting the individuals, families, and the community.

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A more nuanced understanding of individuals' patterns of alcohol use during adolescence, a key developmental period for the onset of use, is of critical importance for refining preventive interventions in this population. To this end, growth mixture modeling (GMM) is a statistical technique that may be used to identify latent subgroups of individuals who exhibit distinct patterns of alcohol use over time. Decisions regarding the timing and interval of survey assessments are particularly challenging in the context of GMM. Latent subgroups exhibit different trends in alcohol use, and these trends must be adequately captured by the survey assessments. Accordingly, the specific aims of the current research were to investigate how measurement timing (i.e., timing and spacing of assessments) affected the identification of the latent subgroups with: (1) an applied study using alcohol data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1997 and (2) a Monte Carlo simulation study. Participants from the NLSY1997 were 15 and 16 years old at Wave 1 ( n = 2686, 49.44% female). Alterations in measurement timing were examined using five different assessment configurations: all 12 waves, two-year intervals, uneven intervals, the first six waves, and the last seven waves. The outcome, the number of drinks consumed per month, was assessed at each of 12 waves that spanned 11.5 years. The results of the applied study with the NLSY data were used as population parameters in the simulation study. The experimental factors investigated in the simulation study were measurement timing and sample size. First, the applied study revealed that the five-class GMM results were very similar when using all 12 waves versus two-year intervals. Only four participants were misclassified (i.e., assigned to subgroups with different average alcohol trajectories). Second, the five-class GMM results when comparing all 12 waves to either the configuration with uneven intervals or the first six waves showed some degree of discrepancy with approximately 14% of the sample being misclassified. Third, the largest discrepancy in the five-class GMM results was observed when comparing the 12 wave and last seven wave configurations with 62% of the sample being misclassified. The simulation study showed that the 95% coverage estimates of the parameters (i.e., factor means, factor variances, factor covariance) were greater than .90 for four of the five assessment configurations, with the exception being the last seven waves. Three of the five assessment configurations produced average estimates of the parameters that were close to the population values. There was less precision in the parameter estimates, as indicated by larger average standard error estimates, for the configurations using the first six waves and the last seven waves. Collectively, these findings strongly suggest that the developmental window under investigation (i.e., all 12 waves versus the first six or last seven waves) had the most substantial impact on the reliability and validity of the five-class GMM solution. The sensitivity of the GMM solution to the timing of the survey assessments (i.e., developmental window) suggests that the latent classes should not be interpreted as representing subgroups that are present in the population. Instead, the identification of latent subgroups is sensitive to variations in research design, which include, but may not be limited to, measurement timing. It is important to better understand how these complex statistical approaches may be artifactually influenced by variations in research design. It may then be possible to have more informed evaluations of how prevention and intervention programs can alter individuals' patterns of alcohol use.

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The first essay of the dissertation, entitled "Do Food Stamps Contribute to Obesity in Low-Income Women?" estimates the effects of food stamps on obesity, overweight and body mass index (BMI) of low-income women. This question is particularly important because participants are substantially more likely to be obese than are nonparticipants. Our analysis differs from previous research in three aspects. First, we exploit a rich longitudinal data set, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), to distinguish between full-time and part-time participation. Second, instead of making parametric assumptions on outcomes, we employ a variety of difference-in-difference matching estimators to control for selection bias. Third, we estimate both short-term (one year of participation) and long-term (three years of participation) treatment effects. Empirical results show that, after controlling for selection bias and defining the treatment and comparison groups carefully, there is little evidence that food stamps are responsible for obesity or higher BMI in female participants. Our estimates are robust to different definitions of the treatment and comparison groups and to various matching algorithms. We further examine prior studies and apply their methods to our samples. We repeat analyses of previous studies using our sample and find that prior studies significantly overstate the causal relationship between the FSP and obesity.

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The goal of this research is to achieve a better understanding of gender differences in the process of wage attainment at entry into the U.S. labor force. I define labor market entry as entry into the first full-time civilian job held after first leaving full-time education in order to exclude short-term and partial attachments to the labor force during the schooling process. I examine the gender gap in wages at labor market entry and evaluate alternative explanations of the wage gap. I consider the effects of gender differences in worker characteristics, including human capital, family structure, work and family aspirations, and the role of employing organizations and social networks in allocating women and men to different jobs within the occupational and industrial structure. Based on data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience, I find that the gender gap in wages declined 10.3 percent among whites and 2.3 percent among blacks over the period o
f a little more than a decade separating the two cohorts. The analysis indicates that reduced gender differences in occupational aspiration, family structure, and human capital all contributed to reduction of the gender gap in wages for blacks and whites, whereas changes in the external influences of employing organizations and network processes on occupational and industrial placement widened the gender gap in wages. I also document that the ratio of female-to-male wages at labor market entry was 85 percent for whites, 85 percent for blacks, and 88 percent for Hispanics for the NLSY. I find that gender differences in human capital, occupational aspirations, and occupational and industrial placement all play an important role in explanation of the gender differences in wages at labor market entry. Differences in the relative importance of these alternative explanatory mechanisms across racial and ethnic groups provide insight into the kinds of changes needed to reduce the gender gap in wages.

Bibliography Citation

Fan, Pi-Ling. Gender and Wage Attainment at Entry into the Labor Market: Cohort and Racial Comparisons. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1996.

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Well-being of the baby boomer generation has been a concern for decades, particularly regarding retirement well-being. An unbalanced attention, however, has been concentrated on old baby boomers, motivating the current study to model well-being of young baby boomers in economic, physical, and psychological dimensions, where the predictors of well-being such as risk-taking behavior in different domains were simultaneously endogenously determined within the theoretical framework.

The data used for this study were from the 1979, 1980, 1981, 1993, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Well-being in each dimension, investment in risky financial assets, and investment in education are jointly modeled using simultaneous equations models.

In the first equation of the simultaneous equations model, years of schooling which was an indicator of education investment was predicted by one's risk tolerance and a set of preference characteristics. Objective risk tolerance under the drug use and sales domain was found to have a significantly negative impact on years of schooling, which means less risk tolerant persons invest more in themselves via education. Consistently, females, Hispanics, and Blacks who were commonly considered less risk tolerant or more economically disadvantaged were found to have more years of schooling. The findings provide evidence for the argument that investment in education may be viewed as one type of insurance, rather than as risky investment, by the young baby boomer generation. Young baby boomers who were not married or did not have any children also had more years of schooling, reflecting the fact that investment in education involves considerable opportunity costs. Therefore, the young boomers who were comparatively short of time tended to invest less in education. Notice that parental education and education of the oldest sibling affected education attainment of the young baby boomers,
implying a lasting and extensive effect of education investment that spreads not only from generation to generation but also within generations.

The second equation in the simultaneous equations model was to examine potential factors that explained any discrepancy in risky financial investments across the young boomers. Empirical results supported the hypothesis that investment in education is a significant predictor variable, which means the young baby boomers who have more schooling allocate their money in the financial market in the form of holding more stocks or possessing a higher ratio of risky financial assets to financial assets, including stocks, corporate bonds or government securities, and mutual funds. Economic indicators such as net worth and total family income had a positive effect, regardless of the definitions of risky financial investments, which implies risky financial assets are normal goods. Home ownership was also a significant predictor for both risky financial investment measures, suggestive of a mechanism of diversification provided by home ownership that helps to minimize the risk from any investment. Objective measures and survey-based measures of risk tolerance, however, failed to account for multi-dimensional nature of risk.

The last equation in the simultaneous equations model was to examine the determinants of individual well-being in particular dimensions. Empirical evidence demonstrated the importance of risky financial investment in determining the difference in economic well-being and the significance of education investment in predicting the discrepancy in economic well-being and psychological well-being, namely self-esteem. Total family income partially explained the disparity in psychological well-being. Note that preference characteristics played different roles across well-being dimensions, accounting for a larger proportion of variation in economic, physical, and psychological well-being. These results are suggestive of multi-dimensional well-being that cannot be predicted by one single common factor, implying the necessity of diversity of government policies and programs.

Based on the empirical results, theoretical and policy implications were drawn. These findings suggest that the original Capital Asset Pricing Model partially explained demand for risky financial assets. Deviations from the model emphasize the importance of adding human capital and other types of assets to the explanation of demand for risky financial assets. The current study has several implications for practitioner, policy makers, and researchers. These implications pertain to allocation time and money on investments in different domains, appropriate guidance to meet clients' financial goals in terms of their time-varying, conditional risk tolerance, instant transfer and tax policies for subsidizing education investment, and development of assessment instruments including multi-dimensional situations and scenarios in each specific domain to assess risk tolerance of individuals.

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The first essay explores the differential impacts of child disability on maternal labor supply due to both episodic conditions such as asthma and other health limitations that do not have episodic symptomology. This is the first study in the literature that child disabilities are broken down into asthma and non-asthma types and episodic versus nonepisodic types of health limitations. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), the differential impacts of child disability on maternal working hours are estimated using Wooldridge's (1995) method. The estimation takes account of unobserved individual effects and sample selection associated with mothers who choose not to work. The empirical results show that single mothers do not experience decreased working hours when they have a child with a health condition other than asthma, but their annual working hours decrease by 165 hours when there is an asthmatic child in the household. Married mothers have the same labor market response to both types of disabilities as their counterparts with healthy children.

The second essay examines the effects of a disabled child on the mother's marital durations. This is the first study that provides a complete picture on how child disability affects different types of marital durations by examining whether child disability has a disruptive effect on the mother's marriage duration, whether child disability deters divorced mothers from being remarried, and how child disability affects never-married mothers' likelihood of starting a marriage. This study also investigates multiple married or unmarried spells to obtain more insight of how a child in poor health affects the mother's marital status in the long term, beyond the first marriage and the first divorce. Using data from NLSY79, the vast majority of individuals of the sample are followed for more than 20 years. The study uses a duration model, which has the advantage of taking into acco
unt of time-varying covariates and censored observations. The estimation procedure also allows unobserved heterogeneity. The results show that a single mother with a disabled child has a significantly lower likelihood of starting a new marriage than her counterparts. Simulations show that child disability deters divorced and never-married mothers from a (re)marriage by an average of 15 months or 14 months, respectively, compared to the situation when the child is in good health. However, the results do not show any evidence that a disabled child has a disruptive effect on the parents' existing marriage.

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This dissertation examines the decision by adults to return to school after they have spent some time in the workforce. Studies of higher education enrollment have long focused on the enrollment behavior of students who enter college immediately following high school graduation. However, there is also a need to better understand the enrollment behavior of adults who decide to return to school after spending time in the workforce. This in turn may provide insights to policy-makers who are in a position to help less-educated individuals get the education they deserve. Currently there is little work reported in the economics literature that attempts to study the decision by adults to return to school.

This dissertation is intended to contribute to our understanding of the decisions made by adults to return to school. Using information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), the following primary questions are addressed: Does labor income, age, or tuition decrease the likelihood that an adult will return to school? Do expected gains from further education increase the likelihood that an adult will return to school? Do other factors such as family income, race and gender affect the likelihood that an adult will return to school?

The findings of the empirical analyses indicate that if a less-educated adult belongs to a racial minority, is male, is relatively older, lives in a poor family, or earns lower-than-median income, then he/she is less likely to return to school. Among persons from poor families or earning low incomes, an increase in income would actually discourage investment in further education instead of making it more affordable for them to return to school. Those who return to school tend to have higher-paying jobs or belong to relatively richer families. Females are more likely to return to school the longer the time that has elapsed since their high school graduation, while minorities are more likely to enroll in college immediately after or within a relatively short period after graduation from high school.

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This dissertation studies the relationships of employer size, wages, return to training, and racial differences in the U.S. Labor market. In addition to the empirical investigations, which are based on data from National Longitudinal Surveys 1979 Youth Cohort (NLSY79), I provide a theoretical model that explains the relationship between employer size and wage return to training from an equilibrium search perspective.

Using NLSY79, the first chapter shows that return to training is higher in small than in large establishments. This new empirical finding is not explained by the existing theories which are based on competitive assumptions. An equilibrium search model is constructed to interpret this empirical regularity. With suitable parameters, the model generates an equilibrium characterized by wage dispersion and one in which (1) large firms pay more to their workers, (2) they train a higher proportion of their workers, and (3) wage return to training is lower in large firms.

The second chapter analyzes the determinants of wage growth for blacks and whites and decomposes the difference in their growth rates. The average difference in black-white wage growth can be almost entirely attributed to the differences in endowments, with pre-market factors---schooling and AFQT---explaining two-thirds and general labor market experience accounting for another third of the differential. The role of labor market discrimination appears to be small.

Chapter three discusses changes in black-white inequality in relation to establishment size. Important aspects of the employment relationship are examined, including job initiation, fringe benefits, on-the-job training, wages, and job separations. The chapter shows that overall racial discrimination in the U.S. labor market does not diminish as establishment size increases, except in the case of hiring. In addition, relative preferential treatment for blacks in terms of hiring is solely responsible for the overrepresentation of blacks in large establishments.

The last chapter summarizes main findings in the dissertation in the unifying framework of equilibrium search theory. It is argued that perfect competition assumptions do not accord with the U.S. labor market well and search is an effective alternative to model the decentralized market.

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Most educational stratification research treats social background as an indirect influence operating through disparities in factors that more directly affect educational outcomes. Children from disparate backgrounds are born on "different sides of the track," with unequal opportunities to acquire what it takes to succeed. I argue that social background also modifies the attainment process, as the contexts of children from disparate backgrounds alter the ways they develop important skills and transform them into educational success. Children from unequal backgrounds are thus born on "different tracks," facing distinct routes to educational success. Analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Child and Young Adult cohorts (NLSCYA) indicate that early skill development has stronger effects on long-term educational achievements such as high school grades and college completion among more socioeconomically advantaged youth. This appears due to the fact that early skills are better reinforced by complementary investments in more advantaged homes.

Additional analyses link these differences to ways SES modifies within-family developmental dynamics. Disadvantaged families invest more in developmentally advanced than less advanced children in early childhood, while advantaged families invest more equally across children. Such dynamics may exacerbate socioeconomic inequality among children who face early developmentally challenges. As children mature, these differences either disappear or reverse, reinforcing socioeconomic disparities among more skilled children.

Decomposition analyses using these same data trace a substantial degree of inequality in educational outcomes to the fact that high-SES children not only have more of the skills, resources, and experiences that promote educational success, but also derive greater benefits from these factors. The same holds in an experimental analysis of a social capital-building developmental intervention, wh
ich primarily benefitted the most socioeconomically advantaged families and children in the study.

In sum, efforts to understand and address intergenerational inequality must account for the fact that socioeconomic disparities between families alter integral aspects of the processes that shape children's developmental and educational trajectories. Whether the goal is to promote upward mobility, reduce inequality, or make educational and developmental interventions more efficient or effective, it is important to consider how socioeconomic background modifies children's environments and experiences.

Bibliography Citation

Fiel, Jeremy E. Different Sides of the Track, or Different Tracks? Socioeconomic Disparities in Processes of Development and Educational Attainment. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2015.

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Social class is often discussed in crime and social control research but the influence of class in these contexts is not well understood. Stratification studies have identified effects of socioeconomic status on a diverse collection of important outcomes in many facets of society, but the influence of class on criminality and punishment remains largely unidentified. Scholars attempting to connect class position to criminal behavior or risk of arrest and incarceration have either concluded that a robust relationship does not exist, or been confronted with inconsistent or weak evidence. Indeed, despite substantial interest in the influence of social class on criminality and punishment, researchers have been unable to make very many empirical connections between the two. The present study advances understanding about the influence of social class on criminality and punishment, addressing limitations of previous research using new approaches and statistical methods across three studies: (1) a study of the relationship between immigration rates and societal preference for increased police protection and law enforcement spending, (2) a study of heterogeneity in the effect of class on latent categories of self-reported delinquency, and finally, (3) a study of illicit drug use and rates of drug arrest among young adults, and how college attendance may contribute punishment inequality for non-violent drug offenses.

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This dissertation examines household characteristics the impact financial decision making. The first essay explores the role of cognitive ability in numeracy, risk tolerance, credit decisions, wealth and retirement savings and asset allocation and finds that cognitive ability is an important predictor of financial decisions. The second essay develops a new instrument to measure time discounting and models asset accumulation and asset allocation and finds that a factor score of intertemporal behaviors is significantly related to both asset accumulation and asset allocation. The third essay documents the decline in basic financial knowledge among households over 60 using a new financial literacy instrument developed to more accurately capture a household's ability to make effective balance sheet, credit, investment, and insurance choices.

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The scope and direction of career and technical education (CTE) has been re-conceptualized based on federal legislation objectives, particularly the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990. Consequently, CTE's historical focus on preparing students solely for the workforce is no longer adequate. Thus, a new emphasis on preparing students for the workforce and for postsecondary education is now on the agenda. In the midst of heightened accountability standards set forth by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, it is essential to evaluate long-term CTE student outcomes. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between high school curriculum tracks and student achievement outcomes through the consideration of degree attainment and occupational earnings. Data on graduates from the 1996-1997 academic school year cohort were analyzed through the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1997 dataset. This study investigated the linkage between participation in high school curriculum tracks, degree attainment and occupational earnings. Findings of this research study indicated that the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990 may not be meeting its objectives in terms of CTE students earning postsecondary degrees. However, this study found that CTE students were indeed outperforming the general, dual, and college preparatory tracks in terms of occupational earnings. More promising was the dual track that was more likely to earn associate's degrees than their general tracked counterparts. As expected, the college preparatory track outperformed all tracks in terms of degree attainment, particularly in earning bachelor's degrees. This study also found that general track students were not as likely to earn degrees and higher earnings as those in the college preparatory, CTE, or dual tracks. In terms of participation rates, Blacks were much more likely to participate in the CTE track, Hispanics were more likely to participate in the general track, and non-Black/non-Hispanics were more likely to participate in the college preparatory track. In addition, this research study provided several implications for CTE programs, teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, parents, as well as for students choosing to enroll in CTE, college preparatory, general, or dual tracks. Future directions for further research that include additional variables that predict participation in high school curriculum tracks, degree attainment, and earnings were provided. Further, the need for longitudinal studies regarding student outcomes of tracking, as well as student outcomes on high school reform initiatives were suggested.

Bibliography Citation

Fletcher, Edward Charles, Jr. The Relationship of High School Curriculum Tracks to Degree Attainment and Occupational Earnings. Ph.D. Dissertation, ED Physical Activities and Educational Services, The Ohio State University, 2009..

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I construct and estimate a life-cycle model of fertility and partnership behavior to examine the relationship between abortion restrictions and single parenthood. In addition to the direct effects of abortion policy on abortion decisions and sexual behavior, the model nests two channels relating abortion policy to partnership that have been discussed in the literature. First, upon becoming pregnant, a woman may realize information about the father's commitment to a relationship. A change in abortion policy impacts the number of women who become pregnant and realize such information. Second, abortion policy impacts competition in the market for partners. In a model of dynamic partnership transitions and fertility decisions, these mechanisms may have immediate effects on behavior and outcomes as well as effects that manifest over time. The estimated model is used to simulate the impacts of removing three types of abortion restrictions: Medicaid-funding restrictions, mandatory delay and counseling laws, and parental consent laws. I find that removing Medicaid-funding restrictions and parental consent laws results in a decrease in unwed motherhood by causing some pregnant women to switch from giving birth to aborting, while having small impacts on the availability of partners. In contrast, the removal of mandatory counseling and delay laws slightly increases unwed motherhood by having a relatively larger impact on the relationship between sexual activity and partnership alternatives.

Bibliography Citation

Forsstrom, Matthew P. Abortion Costs and Single Parenthood: A Life-Cycle Model of Fertility and Partnership. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017.

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Paper 2: Measuring the Black-White Mobility Gap: A Comparison of Datasets and Methods. Chapter 3 utilizes both the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to analyze the magnitude and nature of black-white gaps in intergenerational earnings and income mobility in the United States. This chapter finds that relying on different datasets or measures will lead to different conclusions about the relative magnitudes of black versus white elasticities and correlations, but using directional mobility matrices consistently reveals a sizable mobility gap between black and white families, with low-income black families disproportionately trapped at the bottom of the income distribution and more advantaged black children more likely to lose that advantage in adulthood than similarly situated white children. I find the family income analyses to be most consistent and estimate the upward mobility gap as between 19.1 and 20.3 percentage points and the downward gap between -20.9 and -21.0. Additionally, I find that racial disparities are much greater among sons than daughters and that incarceration and being raised in a female-headed household have much larger impacts on the mobility prospects of blacks than whites.

Bibliography Citation

Fox, Liana E. Three Papers on the Black-White Mobility Gap in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, Columbia University, 2013.

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In this dissertation, I focus on understanding the saving behavior of the wealthy in a life cycle context that includes income and preference heterogeneity, uncertainty about future earnings and occupational choice. The second chapter of my dissertation considers a model of saving behavior in which individuals enjoy being rich, not only because of the future spending that wealth permits, but also because they assign an intrinsic value to the ownership of wealth. This choice of utility function, often called 'capitalist spirit preferences', as articulated by Max Weber (1905), permits heterogeneity in preferences: the very wealthy gain utility directly from wealth, while the rest of the population cares only about consumption, allocating saving for retirement and precautionary reasons. Using this utility function, I construct and simulate a precautionary savings model and calibrate it to the U.S. economy. The simulation results suggest that the model is able to explain the observed right skewness of the U.S. wealth distribution fairly well. Moreover, this form of preferences generates increasing risk tolerance with increasing wealth. This last result is consistent with the empirical observation that the portfolios of the wealthy tend to include a higher proportion of risky assets.

Although the model I developed in the second chapter provides a good fit to the wealth distribution, it was not able to replicate the vast wealth held in the top 5 percentiles of the distribution. Thus, in the third chapter of my dissertation I generalize the income possibilities to include returns on entrepreneurial ventures. I construct and simulate a model where individuals choose between wage work and entrepreneurship. In combination with capitalist spirit preferences the possibility of high returns on entrepreneurial ventures allows the model to generate all of the skewness of the wealth distribution.

The final chapter of this dissertation focuses on the relationship between wealth accumulation and the decision to become an entrepreneur. Empirical studies find a positive relationship between being male, white, older, married, having more assets, and self-employment (see Dunn and Holtz-Eaken 2000). Yet, most theoretical research focuses on the importance of unobservable factors such as risk aversion, entrepreneurial ability and the desire to be one's own boss (see Evans and Jovanovic 1989). Not surprisingly, there exists little empirical evidence on how important these characteristics are in the decision to become an entrepreneur, in particular, whether they play major or minor roles relative to assets and wage opportunities. Further, there is no consensus on whether aspiring entrepreneurs are liquidity constrained (Gentry and Hubbard 2000; Hurst and Lusardi 2003). Using a panel of data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I show that not only are liquidity constraints unlikely to be the major factor in the decision to become an entrepreneur, the characteristics pointed to in the theoretical literature are far more important for this decision.

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This dissertation deals with identifying causal effects in three health and urban economic topics. In my first chapter I examine if the number of physicians in a geographical location affects the population health in that area. I construct a unique panel dataset and use a region fixed effects and instrumental variable strategy to examine the relationship between physician density and population health outcomes in more detail. The results suggest that unobserved heterogeneity between my measures of population health and physician density is present. I conclude that this evidence does not support the claim that an increase in physician density would increase population health in the U.S.

In my second chapter I seek to test the hypothesis that suburban living environments lead to a higher body weight compared to central city environments. I use the geographic information from the confidential NLSY79 files in conjunction with census tract population density data for the years 1981 to 2004. The effect of population density on the body weight of individuals who move is estimated conditioning on individual and area level characteristics. The chapter concludes that the actual effect of population density on the weight of individuals is not as large as the public health literature would want people to believe, but it is neither as insignificant as the urban economic literature to date estimated.

In my last chapter I survey the literature on labor market effects of obesity and then estimate the effect of obesity on labor market outcomes in Germany. To date, only one study briefly considers the effects of weight on labor market outcomes in Germany. This chapter argues that, apart from individual earnings, other labor market outcomes in conjunction with additional data sheds more light on the relationship between weight and labor market outcomes in Germany. This chapter examines the relationship between body weight and labor market outcomes in Germany. While no definite conclusion is reached, this is the first study that attempts to study the relationship between body weight and labor market outcomes in Germany in this detail.

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This dissertation presents three papers applying health economics to the study of risky behaviors. The first uses data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the relationship between adverse events and risky behaviors among adolescents. Substance use responses to experiencing either of two adverse events--violent crime victimization or death of a non-family member one felt close to--explain 6.7 percent of first cigarette use, and 14.3 percent of first use of illegal drugs other than marijuana. Analyses of exercise, a positive coping mechanism, find shock-responses consistent with a coping-response, but not with rational, time-inconsistent, or non-rational drivers considered here. I conclude that distressing events lead to risky behaviors, with a coping response contributing to this effect.

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This dissertation examines the effects of family structure on children's cognitive and non-cognitive achievements, using data on females and their children from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. To deal with dynamic selection into married, cohabiting or single households, I model women's relationship status, school enrollment, employment, family size, and investment in children over the life cycle. All of these behaviors, and the production of children's achievements, are estimated using a random effects joint estimation procedure, which allows the unobserved heterogeneity of the woman and her children to influence both maternal behaviors and children's outcomes. I find that, compared to growing up in single households, being born and raised in married households significantly decreases children's behavioral problems by 0.17 to 0.28 standard deviations, depending on the child's age and gender. These gains are exhibited by children under age ten. Moreover, compared to being raised in cohabiting households, growing up in continuously married households decreases girls' behavioral problems by 0.4 standard deviations, during ages four to six. In addition to measuring causal marginal effects of family structure, this dissertation uses simulation to evaluate how various policy interventions, including marriage promotion, maternal education promotion, and parenting skills training, could potentially impact children's cognitive and non-cognitive achievements differently.

Bibliography Citation

Fu, Ning. When the Honeymoon is Over: The Effects of Family Structure on Children's Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Achievements. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017.

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This dissertation presents two essays in labor economics. In the first essay, I study employer learning in a labor market with dynamic statistical discrimination on the basis of time-varying worker characteristics such as marital status. In the second essay, I explore the relationship between workplace flexibility and worker and occupation characteristics. These essays provide insights into the information frictions in the labor market and the cost of providing job amenities.

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The prevalence of childhood chronic conditions has substantially increased over the last several decades, shifting the focus from survival to improving quality of life for children and their families. This dissertation draws attention to the importance of focusing on individual lives as linked lives when investigating stratification in health and socioeconomic outcomes, where the health and socioeconomic experiences of one family member are potentially formative life events for other members of the family.

While many studies use parental socioeconomic status and health to predict in part their children's future prospects, the first empirical chapter investigates the dynamic relationship of child health with maternal health and socioeconomic factors over time. Using a series of latent growth curve models, this study examines the association between trajectories--or intra-individual models of stability and change--of child activity limitations and trajectories of maternal limitations in work due to health, labor force participation and household poverty status. The second analytic chapter examines and accounts for potential methodological biases in the relationship of child health with maternal health and socioeconomic factors in three ways: autoregressive cross-lagged models that address the reciprocal relationship between child health and maternal outcomes, fixed effects analyses that control for individual characteristics that are constant over time to limit omitted variable bias, and a latent class analysis to address in part both omitted variable bias and measurement error. The third analytic chapter examines the concordance of mothers' and children's reports of children's general health status, the concurrent validity of both mothers' and children's reports of children's general health status, and whether the association between child and maternal health depends on who reports children's health status.

This dissertation unifies research on stratification in socioeconomic and health outcomes with the life course and stress process perspectives, by pushing traditional stratification research to take seriously the idea that individual lives are linked lives and applying unique methodological approaches that account for the linked lives of mothers and children at the point in the life course when the child lives at home.

Bibliography Citation

Garbarski, Dana. Dynamic and Dyadic Relationships: An Extension of the Socioeconomic Status-Health Relationship. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012.

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The purpose of the present study was to determine the correlates of college entrance in a longitudinal sample. Past researchers have studied the relationship among intelligence (Binet, 1916; Gardner, 1993; Goleman, 1995), locus of control (Boiler, 1966: Stipek & Gralinski, 1996), socioeconomic status (Fairweather & Shaver, 1991) race and gender (Halpern et al., 1995) on academic achievement. However, much of this research focused on only one or more of these predictor variables, while also employing small non-representational sample sizes. The results of these studies were thereby limited in scope by their exclusion of important variables, as well as being segregated to small segments of the population, making it difficult to generalize the conclusions to other samples. The present researcher sought to address some of these methodological limitations and subsequently expand the scope of the literature in this field.

This study differed from previous studies in that it is archival and longitudinal. The participants came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, a nationally representative data base (NLSY79, 1997). The sample of the NLSY79 included 12,686 young adults first surveyed in 1979. These individuals are presently in their forties and have been surveyed for over twenty years. Participants' school and life experiences were recorded. The subsequent data allowed this researcher to study predictor variables most related to college entrance.

Multiple correlations and path analyses were utilized in this study. The correlations which were found to be statistically significant and accounted for the most variance included IQ and achievement scores positive correlation to college entrance. The direct paths that were statistically significant toward the achievement measure (i.e., Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) included family poverty, race, locus of control orientation and higher self esteem. The achievement variable (i.e., ASVAB) accounted for the most variance with regard to participants staying in school and entering college. Results are discussed in terms of psycho-educational settings.

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Numerous studies have found that high school dropouts are more involved in delinquency and drug use than high school graduates. The fact that delinquency and drug use appear to go hand-in-hand with high school dropout has led some researchers to claim that delinquency and drug use lead to dropping out of school. However, this claim is not fully supported by prior studies that have examined this issue. Although some studies suggest that delinquency and drug use do lead to dropout, other studies find that delinquency and drug use are unrelated to dropout once other predictors of dropout are taken into consideration. This study addresses three shortcomings of prior studies that may account for these divergent findings. This study (1) takes seriously the possibility that, rather than causing dropout, delinquency and drug use are symptoms of underlying problems which also contribute to dropout; (2) examines whether social sanctions--specifically, school suspension and arrest--condition the effects of delinquency and drug use on dropout; (3) explores whether the effects of delinquency and drug use on dropout vary by social class. I use seven waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). "Hybrid" random effects models, which control for both observed and unobserved differences between youth, are used to examine the possibility that youth self-select into delinquency, drug use, and dropout. Results indicate that overall, drug use, but not delinquency, leads to dropping out, although the effects are small. When the effects of delinquency and drug use are examined separately for lower-class and middle-class youth, delinquency only leads to dropout for middle-class youth who are arrested. Drug use leads to dropout regardless of a youth's social class or whether they are suspended or arrested. These findings suggest that while the relationships among delinquency, drug use, and dropout are complicated, problem behaviors are not the primary reason
why youth leave school. Implications for future research and dropout prevention are discussed.

Bibliography Citation

Gasper, Joseph Michael. Do Delinquency and Drug Use Lead to Dropping Out of High School? Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 2009.

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This is a dissertation in public economics that focuses on enrollment and persistence in higher education. Chapter 1, titled "Stopping out College: The Role of Credit Constraints", quantifies the extent to which stopout behavior is due to credit constraints by estimating a dynmanic discrete choice model. Each period the individual decides whether or not to enroll in college and how much to save and consume. Credit constraints only explain a small portion of stopout behavior. Chapter 2, titled "Does In-State Tuition for Undocumented Immigrants Lead to Crowding out of Native Students in Postsecondary Education?", tests whether laws allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition lead to crowding out of native students in the first year undergraduate student body using difference-in-differences. Texas and California are the only states which such laws that experience a significant increase in non-resident aliens. There is no evidence of crowding out in Texas. In California the results are less clear. Hispanics decrease their enrollment in the sector non-resident aliens increase their enrollment. However, this may be due to differences in how students categorize themselves before and after the laws are passed. Chapter 3, titled "Bachelor's Degree Recipients and Enrollment in Training Programs," examines bachelor's degree recipients who enroll in training programs. The nine percent of bachelor's degree recipients who enroll are more likely to be a minority. They also work more than those who do not enroll. After enrolling in a training program, individuals quit their old jobs and work closer to 40 hours/week. One story the data are consistent with is that those who enroll faced work hour constraints.

Bibliography Citation

Gaulke, Amanda P. Essays on Enrollment and Persistence in Higher Education. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2015.

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This thesis investigates the sequential college attendance, labor supply, and marital status decisions of high school females. Two main questions are asked: (1) how large is the impact of marriage on women's college choice? (2) how can the returns to schooling defined by schooling coefficient in earnings equation be consistently estimated? A dynamic choice model of school attendance, labor supply, and marriage is formulated and structurally estimated using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Marriage is found to have as large an effect on college choice as earnings. The college graduation rate would drop from 38% to 32% if the benefits from marriage were not taken into account. Simulated data from the estimated structural model are used to study the discrepancy between OLS and IV estimates of the returns to schooling. Despite being highly restrictive, the structural approach seems to have advantages in estimating the returns to schooling. As an out of sample validation of the model, the estimated model is used to predict the college enrollment behavior of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) sample. The model can account for 75% of the dramatic increase in college enrollment between the early 1980's and the early 2000's.

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Trade unions and gender discrimination are generally considered as sources of labor market imperfections. My dissertation is a study of the effects of these distortions on three specific outcomes: occupational injuries, earnings of injured workers, and gender pay differentials in the arts occupations.

The first chapter of my dissertation investigates the relationship between union coverage and work-related injuries. Trade unions play a central role in establishing a safe work place at the firm level. Union representatives ensure the implementation of safety standards set by the Occupational and Safety Health Administration (OSHA) and provide employees in bargaining units with education on job-specific risks. As a consequence, the injury rates of workers covered by union contracts may be expected to be lower than those of uncovered workers, given similar demographic and occupational characteristics. However, the work environment is not the sole determinant of injury rates. One additional factor is the worker's effort to avoid and minimize work-related hazards. When the personal accident-prevention activities cannot be monitored, the employee needs to face a correct system of incentives. If union representation fails to provide these incentives, covered workers may experience higher injury rates than uncovered employees. In analyzing this relationship, previous studies have failed to include controls for one or both of the following factors: (1) individual unobservable characteristics, and (2) firm-specific hazards. Using data from the NLSY79, the goal of the first chapter is to address these major limitations and provide an estimate of the effect of union coverage on the probability of nonfatal work-related injuries. The results of this chapter indicate that covered workers are about 50 percent more likely to suffer an occupational injury than similar uncovered workers. The direction of this estimate is then interpreted within a moral hazard framework, where
union and nonunion workers face different incentives when they choose their level of accident-prevention activities.

The second chapter examines the economic consequences of a work-related injury. Injured workers may experience reductions in earnings for multiple reasons. First, injured workers may experience temporary or permanent decreases in work hours. Second, the wage of the worker may decrease because of lower post-injury productivity caused by any loss in general, specific or health human capital. This outcome is more likely to occur when the injured worker is forced to change firms, occupation or industry. In this setting, union coverage at the time of the injury may play an important role in reducing the size of the earnings losses. Unions provide protection against dismissal without just cause and may favor the assignment of an injured worker to a different job or work schedule within the same firm, therefore decreasing the probability of quitting. Using data from the NLSY79, this chapter applies a A standard version of the difference-in-difference methodology is used to investigate whether union coverage at the time of the injury is able to reduce the earnings losses caused by the injury. The findings indicate that union coverage is able to preserve workers' earnings in the year of the injury.

The third chapter investigates whether gender discrimination affects the earnings in the arts occupations. Female artists generally earn less than male artists who work in the same occupation. This gender earnings gap can be due to a combination of differences in individual characteristics (explained portion) and differences in the returns to endowments (unexplained portion). The latter have been often interpreted as an estimate of discrimination, although they could be the result of gender differences in unobservable skills. Using the Five Percent PUMS from the 2000 U.S. Census, a modified Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique (Yun, 2005) is applied
to the gender wage gap for eleven arts occupations. The results of this chapter show that a significant unexplained pay gap, which could be attributed to discrimination, exists for female artists employed in full-time jobs. The explained portion of the gap indicates that women are often segregated into low-paying industries. A second type of decomposition (Fairlie, 2003) is then used to investigate the reasons of gender segregation across industries. These additional findings suggest that discriminatory hiring practices are likely to exist for some arts occupations.

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Underage drinking is a leading public health problem in the United States. Despite the empirical support for the protective influence of parental monitoring on youth alcohol involvement, recently the construct has been criticized for typically being a measure of parental knowledge of children's whereabouts, behaviors, and peer associations rather than active parental behavior. Moreover, studies exploring the role of child disclosure on parental knowledge and youth alcohol use remain scant.

Using data from the ongoing biennial National Longitudinal Survey on Youth surveys, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were applied to empirically define parental monitoring using measures encompassing multiple facets of the construct. Parental monitoring was ultimately operationalized using a second-order confirmatory factor model, with four first-order factors (i.e. parental school involvement, communication, time involvement, rules/decision-making) supporting the definition of a 'set of correlated parenting behaviors' (Dishion & McMahon, 1998). Consistent with a transactional conceptual framework (Wills & Dishion, 2004), path analysis examined the direct and indirect longitudinal associations between parental monitoring, child disclosure, parental knowledge, and alcohol involvement among children and young adults.

Findings indicated that parental monitoring was a significant protective factor for females across a number of alcohol use measures, both directly and indirectly via child disclosure, maternal knowledge, and early alcohol initiation in the case of subsequent heavier alcohol use. In males, higher monitoring levels in middle childhood protected against alcohol-problem use in young adulthood. Child disclosure reduced the odds of binge drinking in females, controlling for negative peer pressure and maternal alcohol use.

Through proper monitoring practices, parents play an important role in reducing both short-term and long-term alcohol
involvement in youth, particularly among females. Proper monitoring could help buffer the observed independent effect of negative peer pressure in early childhood on later youth alcohol use. Child disclosure was an important mediator that warrants further attention. The study provides further support for parenting influences on youth alcohol use and will help guide existing family-focused evidence-based programs aimed at reducing youth substance use and misuse.

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In this dissertation I explore the early career paths of highly educated workers. In the first two chapters I focus on the inherent preferences for job mobility and leisure and their impact on the careers of young professionals. The third chapter links workers' investments in education to the timing of family formation.

Little evidence exists on the relationship between working hours and future wage growth. In the first chapter I examine this relationship and show a well-defined convexity: the positive effect of hours is stronger at high levels of labor supply. A four-wave panel survey of men and women who registered to take the GMAT between June 1990 and March 1991 is used to show that this relationship is especially strong for young professional workers, but it is also present in the more broadly representative 1979 cohort of the NLSY. As the underlying mechanism for this empirical regularity, I propose a job-ladder model in which workers differ in their preferences for leisure. The findings can be used to account for up to half of the gender gap in wage growth.

The second chapter links a worker's propensity to change jobs to the educational choices she makes. A model of the choice of graduate management program type based on job search theory predicts that more mobile workers are more likely to enroll in a full-time Master of Business Administration program. The chapter also adds to the literature on employer-provided general training; the model predicts that employers are more likely to provide tuition assistance to workers who find quits costly. I use the survey of GMAT registrants to show that these predictions hold true empirically.

In the third chapter I focus on the effect of student debt on marriage and fertility. Using the GMAT Registrant Survey, I find that higher amounts of business school loans decrease the probability of observing marriage or births, particularly for men. Other sources of financing like employer-provided tuition assistance do not have such an effect. I also show evidence that expectations about fertility do not influence observed student debt.

Bibliography Citation

Gicheva, Dora. Educational, Career and Family Outcomes of Young Professional Workers. Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 2010.

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This thesis focuses on female labor supply, human capital and assortative mating. The first chapter examines the link between the gap in spousal education and the labor supply behavior of married women over the life-cycle. Based on data from the 1965-2011 March Current Population Surveys and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979, it documents that, all else equal, if the wife's education exceeds her husband's then she is substantially more likely to be employed than if she is less educated than her husband (up to 14.5 percentage points). A dynamic life-cycle model of endogenous marriage and labor supply decisions in a collective framework is formulated and structurally estimated. It establishes that the link between a husband's educational attainment and a wife's labor supply decision, at the time of marriage, produces dynamic effects due to human capital accumulation and implied wage growth. Returns to experience account for 57 percent of the employment gap observed between women who had married "down" and those who married "up". Counterfactuals also indicate that, alone, the changes in assortative mating patterns across cohorts, which are implied by the changes in the marginal distributions of education, are able to explain a sizable proportion (roughly 25 percent) of the observed rise in married women's labor force participation. The second chapter analyzes the evolution of educational assortative mating along racial lines. Previous studies suggest that preferences have changed across cohorts in the US to produce an increase in assortative mating. The analysis in the second chapter challenges the metric of measurement for assortative mating and shows that educational assortative mating has been stable over time for blacks and whites despite social and economic changes that might have impacted individual's incentives to form a marriage. The third chapter proposes a novel instrument for catholic school attendance that exploits the abrupt shock to catholic schools' human capital in the aftermath of the second Vatican council. It shows that the positive correlation between Catholic schooling and student outcomes is explained by selection bias.

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This multi-paper dissertation addresses the association of residential mobility with different realms of individual and family outcomes as well as the implications of family on residential mobility and choice. The first section reviews the existing literature on residential mobility and implications for families. Situated in a life course perspective, the three substantive chapters include: (1) a longitudinal analysis of the implications of residential mobility for child educational achievement and behavior at different stages of adolescence, (2) an examination of the association between residential mobility and changes in parenting processes, and (3) a longitudinal analysis of the relationship between early intergenerational and family solidarity and later geographic distance to parents in the Netherlands. The concluding section of the dissertation summarizes the findings of these three chapters and situates the findings within a broader theoretical and empirical context.
Residential Mobility and Adolescent Achievement and Behavior. Chapter two examines the relationship between residential mobility and adolescent academic achievement and behavior problems. Specifically, this chapter addresses how the effects of moving differ by age and how social capital moderates the impact of moving on children. Children's behavior problems and academic achievement test scores were compared across four survey waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006) and matched to data from their mothers' reports from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. As suggested by a life-course perspective, the negative effects of moving on behavior problems decrease as children get older. The results also show that several social capital factors moderate the effects of moving on behavior but not achievement.
Residential Mobility and Change in Parenting Processes. In chapter three, the association between residential mobility and changes in parenting style and parental monitoring are investigated using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Logistic and multinomial logistic regression results indicate that moving is not significantly associated with change in parental monitoring. Moving is significantly associated with changes in parenting style for both mothers and fathers. However, specific changes in parenting styles for residentially mobile mothers and fathers depend upon the parenting style exhibited before the move. These changes also depend on the gender composition of the parent-child dyad.
Early Intergenerational Cohesion and Later Geographic Distance to Parents. The aim of the fourth chapter is to provide a clearer understanding of the longitudinal factors affecting adult children's geographic distance to their parents. Using the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study, regression analysis was adopted to determine the relationship between early parent-child closeness (ages 18–35) and later adult geographic distance to parents, controlling for a host of theoretically important variables. The findings indicate that early closeness to parent is significantly associated with later geographic distance to parents. Preliminary support for these findings is shown using nationally representative data from the United States.

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This dissertation contains three chapters focusing on the impact of several personality traits -- locus of control, self-esteem and self-monitoring - on economic outcomes including wages, educational attainment, and decisions in game-theoretical experiments. In the first chapter, entitled "The Effects of Personality Traits on Wages: A Matching Approach," I utilize the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to estimate the effects of adolescent measurements of self-esteem and locus of control on adult wages using propensity score matching. An adolescent possessing high self-esteem will experience between 8.5 to 9.2 percent higher wages as an adult. When cognitive skill and family background characteristics are controlled for, locus of control as an adolescent is insignificant in explaining adult wages.

In the second chapter entitled "Self-esteem, Educational Attainment and Wages: A Question of Selection," I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 again to explore the relationship between self-esteem and wages found in the first chapter more closely. I find that self-esteem partially estimates selection into higher levels of education. Conditional on this selection, the remaining direct effects of self-esteem on wages are negligible. This evidence suggests that self-esteem affects wages indirectly through educational attainment.

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Why does the gender gap in earnings increase over women and men's life course? Why are mothers penalized in the labor market, whereas fathers are rewarded? Most studies have answered these questions by focusing on the devaluation of women's work and on the dilemmas that mothers face in negotiating competing demands of work and families. In contrast, I focus on patterns of gender-linked advantages for men in work and families. I analyze fathers' labor market outcomes by drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1970 to 2000 U.S. Censuses. I argue that gender structures mothers and fathers' experiences in work and families and reduces women's long-term occupational prospects and possibilities for economic independence while increasing men's.

I find that gender intersects with race, class, and occupational status and leads to a larger fatherhood wage premium for relatively advantaged men (married, whites, professionals, or the college educated). For married white men, one child is associated with a $7,300 increase in annual earnings. For married black men, one child is associated with a $3,100 increase in annual earnings. Although married white men earn a premium for each additional child, married black men pay a penalty for having more than two children. Married white men also spend more time at work on the birth of a child, whereas married black men do not. These outcomes remain robust in fixed effects and instrumental variable models. They likely reflect the gender division of labor as well as employers' preferential treatment of fathers over childless men.

Over the past three decades married white men have experienced a significant reduction in their fatherhood earnings premium. Married black men have not experienced any change in the small premium that they earn for having one and two children, and they have experienced an increase in the penalty that they pay for having a third child. The rise of racial inequality between married white and black fathers parallels the erosion of black men's employment stability. As gender inequality between mothers and fathers subsided over the past thirty years, racial inequality among married fathers has increased.

Bibliography Citation

Glauber, Rebecca. Gender and Race in Families and at Work: Fatherhood and Men's Labor Market Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 2007.

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Adults today will search for jobs throughout their careers in an economy where job insecurity has reached even the historically privileged white-collar workforce. Meanwhile at every educational level, minorities have less successful employment outcomes than Whites. African Americans and Hispanics in general experience higher levels of unemployment than any other ethnic group. Broader job insecurity and contemporary racial disparities render these ethnic groups doubly insecure. How then do racial and ethnic minorities get ahead in a climate of broader economic uncertainty for white-collar workers?

I address this question through a mixed methods study of the experiences of Black and Latino young adults in labor market intermediaries (LMIs). Employers and jobseekers often rely on LMIs to make job matches. I combine qualitative data on four non-profit intermediaries that target Black and Latino jobseekers with national-level, quantitative data on intermediary use and job outcomes.

I found that specific LMIs--e.g. schools and public agencies--help these ethnic groups get jobs. Intermediaries can also influence earnings and job satisfaction. Additionally, I found that the effect of using intermediaries does not always accrue equitably. Using schools to find jobs yielded cross-ethnic gains in earnings while using family and friends only harmed Blacks. Next, I conducted an in-depth qualitative study of an organization serving low-skilled ethnic minorities. I found that through an LMI, this group acquired work-relevant cultural capital, and I specify in this dissertation how that socialization process occurred. Finally, I compared the job placement experiences of Blacks and Latinos across four minority-targeted intermediaries. I found that the programs gave elite college graduates an edge in competing for elite jobs, placed non-elite college graduates in the running for elite jobs, and brought high school graduates into the race for good jobs. These stratified transitions revealed that low-skilled workers faced relatively more turbulent pathways to career entry and needed continued support beyond the program period. I concluded that some labor market intermediaries facilitate upward mobility for minorities even if that mobility may not be enough to produce broader racial and social equality.

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This project is composed of three empirical chapters. The first chapter uses matched mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY79) to describe the association between young adults' family structure and their emotional closeness to their parents. The second chapter uses data from a sample of college students from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (NLSY97) to evaluate the association between students' family structure and their receipt of financial assistance for college. Finally, the third chapter uses data from the NLSY97 to evaluate whether differences in family structure by parents' socioeconomic status can account for socioeconomic disparities in young adults' educational attainment at the population level. Taken together, these chapters document how family structure continues to matter for children's wellbeing as they embark on their adult lives, and they add new evidence to the debate about the importance of family structure for intergenerational mobility.

Bibliography Citation

Goldberg, Julia S. The Long Reach of Families: Family Structure History, Parental Support, and the Reproduction of Inequality in Young Adulthood. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015.

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Chapter 2 studies interdependence between health and educational attainment. The structural estimation framework fully imposes the restrictions of the existing theoretical hypotheses on the correlation between health and education. The model's estimates imply that an individual's initial health status has a substantial influence on an individual's educational attainment and the expected probability of survival. Policy experiments based on the model's estimates indicate that a health expenditure subsidy conditional on high school attendance would have a larger impact on the educational attainment than a direct college tuition subsidy.

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This dissertation consists of three essays concerning self-selection, learning, and incentives arising from the structure of the firm.

The first chapter investigates the relationship between wages and the size of previous employers. Despite the plethora of papers examining the firm-size wage premium, there is little attention to potential long-term effects of firm size on wages. This paper documents a positive association between current wages and previous firm size, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The magnitude of this relationship is larger among workers that are more able. These workers are also substantially more likely to be working in large firms. I develop a dynamic model where workers choose the size of their employer to maximize career earnings. Large firms offer the opportunity to specialize, which increases the rate of learning. The model induces self-selection based on human capital into large firms and higher career wages for those that start in large firms.

The second essay develops a framework where some firms employ up-or-out rules, while others do not. Up-or-out rules are optimal for firms when they must screen new associates to find partners and have an incentive to maintain partnership quality. I show that when workers have heterogeneous effort costs, the higher effort cost workers will self-select into firms that do not use up-or-out rules. A costly investment, in the form of effort as an associate, is required to reveal productivity as a partner. Workers with high effort costs do not find the investment worthwhile, thus, they will not make partner and select firms where they can retain their firm-specific human capital.

The final essay looks at the incentive effects associated with up-or-out rules. I describe a model with heterogeneous abilities among associates. Firms observe a noisy signal of output based on associate ability and effort. Using permanent associates as well as partnership, the firm
is able to induce the optimal effort from all types; up-or-out rules alone cannot accomplish this. Use of a consolation prize requires the firm to increase the rewards of partnership, to prevent high ability workers from pooling with lower ability workers.

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Currently, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of all large countries in the world. Beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. criminal justice system underwent a dramatic transformation in its sentencing practices that is largely responsible for today's historic levels of incarceration. In this dissertation, I provide evidence on two questions: 1) What are the implications of the growth in incarceration; and 2) Can rhetoric be used to increase public support for rolling back U.S. incarceration rates?
The first two empirical chapters of this dissertation provide evidence addressing the first question. In the first empirical chapter, I use data from 15 advanced democratic countries from 1971-2010 to explore whether cross-national variation in incarceration rates contributes to cross-national variation in relative poverty rates. The results suggest that there is no average association, but this obscures the fact the association is contingent on a country's level of welfare state generosity and female employment. In the second empirical chapter, I explore whether U.S children who experience the incarceration of household members are at greater risk of experiencing a premarital first birth. The results suggest that experiencing household incarceration in early adolescence is associated with an increase in a child's risk of growing up to have a premarital first birth, particularly when a father or extended household member is incarcerated.

Bibliography Citation

Gottlieb, Aaron. Mass Incarceration in the United States: New Evidence on Implications and Ways Forward. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, 2016.

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In Chapter 3, I shift my focus away from the effect of labor market changes on the household to consider the effect of family events on labor market outcomes. Specifically, I examine how birth spacing, along with birth timing, affects mothers' long-term labor market outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Gough, Margaret. Consequences of Family Events: Three Papers on Family Change and Subsequent Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2012.

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My second chapter deals with the appropriate approach to modeling frictional labor markets, and is joint work with Christine Braun, Bryan Engelhardt, and Peter Rupert. In it, we address whether the arrival rate of a job independent of the wage that it pays. To do this we address how, and to what extent, unemployment insurance changes the hazard rate of leaving unemployment across the wage distribution using a Mixed Proportional Hazard Competing Risk Model and data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Controlling for worker characteristics we reject that job arrival rates are independent of the wages offered. We apply the results to several prominent job-search models and interpret how our findings are key to determining the efficacy of unemployment insurance.

Three Essays on U.S. Social Policy's Impact on the Human Capital Development of Young Adults At-Risk of Poverty
Ph.D. Dissertation, Depart of Public Administration, Syracuse University, 2015
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Disadvantaged, Economically; Educational Attainment; Program Participation/Evaluation; Social Security

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My final dissertation chapter investigates how a particular college fund guarantee affected achievements in higher education. Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) and a difference-in-differences model, this work re-examines the impact of the Social Security Student Benefits Program (SSSBP) on post-secondary educational attainment, a topic first studied by Dynarski (2003). By exploiting a larger panel of data and exploring degree attainment at various ages, my coauthor and I find that disadvantaged youth potentially qualifying for SSSBP funds - e.g., those losing a father before they turned 18 - were over 20 pp more likely to obtain higher education degrees beyond their high school diploma than similar students who would have qualified for benefits, but-for the program's termination in May 1982. Initial program impacts - i.e., those by age 23 - show an increase in Associate's degree attainment. As these respondents age, however, many go on to obtain four year degrees. Impacts are large and statistically significant, and suggestive that social programs seeking to reduce the financial costs of Associate's degrees - such as the one announced by President Obama in his 2015 State of the Union Address - could be well-targeted.

Bibliography Citation

Groves, Lincoln. Three Essays on U.S. Social Policy's Impact on the Human Capital Development of Young Adults At-Risk of Poverty. Ph.D. Dissertation, Depart of Public Administration, Syracuse University, 2015.

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This thesis examines the relationship between the risk of work accidents, investments in safety, and wages. Standard theory predicts that safety investments lower wages since workers and firms have negative tradeoffs between these variables. However, this hinges on the assumption that safety is modifiable only by firms. In this thesis, I incorporate worker investment in safety to the conventional model to examine its effects on risk and wages. The model predicts that risk falls and wages rise when workers invest in safety.

I then test these predictions empirically. Because worker safety investments are difficult to measure, I take an indirect approach. Previous studies find that body weight is positively associated with the risk of accidents (injuries), suggesting workers can invest in safety by maintaining a lower weight. Thus, using body mass index (BMI) as a proxy for such investment, and the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), I estimate the effect of high BMI on the risk of experiencing a workplace injury. I find that obesity increases the risk of injury by 22 percent. However, although non-obese workers have higher safety-related productivity, this is probably not (entirely) due to purposeful investment.

I then use the 1979 NLSY and job risk data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine whether worker investments in safety (safety-related productivity) increase wages. Comparing wage differences in high and low risk jobs for low- and high-BMI workers, I find that obese workers earn a 5 percent smaller return to risk than their non-obese counterparts, which is consistent with the hypothesis.

Finally, in a similar analysis but focusing more on the effects of weight per se, I assess whether a correlation between weight and wages can be explained by safety-related productivity. I find that obese males in high risk jobs earn 5 percent lower wages than their non-obese counterparts due to their lower safety-related productivity. For females, between 49 and 78 percent of the wage effects of obesity yielded by cross-sectional estimates can be explained by lower safety-related productivity, and the remainder by individual heterogeneity.

Bibliography Citation

Guardado, Jose R. The Effects of Worker Investments in Safety on Risk of Accidents and Wages. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2008..

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Chapter 1: Can Twenty Minutes on the Treadmill Save You From Bankruptcy? The Impact of Obesity on Consumer Bankruptcy. Abstract: Over the last two decades, both bankruptcy and obesity rates in the U.S.
have seen a steady rise. Obesity being one of the leading causes of medical and
morbidity related economic costs; we study if it has any influence on personal
bankruptcy. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we
employ a duration model to investigate the relative importance of obesity on
the timing of bankruptcy. Even after accounting for possible endogeneity of
BMI and controlling for a wide variety of individual and aggregate-level
confounding factors, being obese puts one at a greater risk of filing for
bankruptcy.

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Chapter 1 shows that wage grows faster with experience in labor markets with larger shares of college-educated workers (college share). An instrumental variable and panel data with individual fixed effects are used to address the potential endogeneity of college share and the sorting of workers across labor markets respectively. The effect of the college share of a labor market is shown to persist after workers leave the market, suggesting that a larger college share raises returns to experience through the accumulation of human capital valuable in all markets.

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This paper evaluates the long-term welfare consequences from experiencing a recession as youths, taking into account the impact on schooling, future job mobility, human capital accumulation, labor supply and wages. The paper also explores the mechanisms that account for lifetime wage changes by decomposing those changes into different channels: changes from schooling, from work experience, and from job mobility. To achieve these goals, this paper develops and estimates a search equilibrium model with heterogenous agents and aggregate shocks. The model is an extension of a directed search model, the Block Recursive Equilibrium framework of Menzio and Shi (2010), which remains tractable when it is solved outside of the steady state. The counterfactual analysis shows that experiencing the 1981-1982 recession at age 16-22 causes a 2.2% to 3.0% loss in lifetime welfare. Endogenizing schooling decision avoids overestimation of the welfare loss. The wage decomposition shows that the loss from job mobility explains the majority of the wage loss during the recession, and the loss in experience and tenure persists long after the recession.

Bibliography Citation

Guo, Naijia. The Impact of an Early Career Recession on Schooling and Lifetime Welfare. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 2014.

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This research is a systematic comparison of youth migration experiences between two birth cohorts, using the first ten rounds of two national longitudinal surveys of youth, NLSY79 and NLSY97. Results show both changes and continuities in youth migration patterns across cohorts for ages 16-25. Specifically, youth today have a delayed but stronger migration momentum than the late baby boom generation, the dividing point being at age 22. Women are more likely to migrate than men in the recent cohort, but not in the older cohort. Whites migrate considerably more than blacks and Hispanics consistently across cohorts. The likely life events in youth's transition to adulthood are important indicators of youth's migration propensity for both cohorts. Particularly, graduating with a bachelor's degree is the most powerful predictor of youth's migration propensity. Other life events such as getting married; becoming separated, divorced, or widowed; dropping out of college; and losing a job are also significantly associated with youth migration. In general, the effects of these life events on youth's migration propensity are weakened across cohorts, but the importance of having a college degree on migration propensity has been increasing.

Bibliography Citation

Guo, Yan. Comparison of Youth Migration Patterns Across Cohorts: Evidence from Two National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology, Utah State University, December 2009.

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In the third chapter, using model in which the assignment of skills to tasks is determined by relative productivities and are endogenously determined by ability, access to higher education, and technology, I find the effect of different educational aid schemes (including need-based aid, merit-based aid, or a combination of the two) on the distribution of wages. I calibrate the model using NLSY97 data and find that in general, determining what policy minimizes inequality depends on the elasticities of demand for higher education of each ability/human capital group, the labor shares of each group, and the share of resources devoted to each group. Given the model parameters, both merit-based and need-based policies are preferred to a policy based on both merit and need. Moreover, under the model parameters, a need-based policy reduces wage inequality more than a merit-based policy.

Bibliography Citation

Hadavand, Aboozar. Essays on Economics of Inequality. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, City University of New York, 2017.

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Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States and smoking prevalence has declined more slowly in the last decade than previously. This dissertation explored two interrelated factors that might reduce smoking initiation and promote cessation to re-accelerate declines in smoking prevalence: fruit and vegetable consumption (FVC) and depressive symptomatology. Three observational cohort studies were conducted with the first two assessing direct FVC-smoking associations using generalized linear modeling to estimate risk ratios. The third study tested for FVC moderation of depressive symptomatology and smoking associations using the Johnson-Neyman technique. All three studies included covariates of demographics and general health behavior orientation variables for statistical adjustment. Study 1 found that adult smokers (age range = 25-105 years; Mage = 45.6 years) in the highest quartile of FVC at baseline, compared to the lowest, were 3.05 times more likely to quit smoking and remain abstinent from all tobacco products for ≥ 30 days at 1-year follow-up (p < .01; n = 751). Study 2 found longitudinally, through secondary data analysis of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: Child and Young Adult (NLSY79-CYA) data, that baseline older adolescents (aged 14-18 years in the year 2004) who consumed fruit at least weekly had a lower level of smoking progression at 4-year follow-up than those who typically did not consume fruit ( p < .05; n = 388). Study 3 found FVC moderation of the association between depressive symptomatology and smoking cross-sectionally among both older adolescents (aged 14-18 years; n = 534; NLSY79-CYA data) and younger adults (aged 19-33 years; n = 2164; NLSY79-CYA data). Longitudinally among baseline adolescents, FVC moderated the association between baseline smoking frequency and 4-year follow-up depressive symptomatology. Among baseline young adult smokers, FVC moderated the inverse association between baseline depressive symptomatology and quitting smoking by 4-year follow-up. The results of the three studies suggest that FVC may be protective against cigarette smoking and promote smoking cessation. However, current results remain limited in their generalizability due to survey and analysis methodology paired with the complexity of both dietary and smoking behaviors. Further research is warranted to inform the consistency of the associations, to examine possible explanatory mechanisms, and to assess the efficacy of increasing FVC for smoking prevention and cessation.

Bibliography Citation

Haibach, Jeffrey P. The Association between Fruit and Vegetable Consumption and Cigarette Smoking: Initiation, Cessation, and Possible Explanatory Mechanisms. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Community Health and Health Behavior, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2014.

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In the second essay, we explore whether the introduction of school accountability policies can account for changes in ADHD diagnosis. We exploit differences across states and time in the introduction of school accountability laws to estimates differences in mean ADHD diagnosis. The results from our analysis suggest that one policy, state-level rewards given to high-performing schools, leads to approximates a 3 percentage point increase in the probability of an ADHD diagnosis among children. We find that the children most impacted by the policy are those whose mothers' reported zero behavioral problems in the pre-policy period, perhaps indicating that prior to the policy these mothers did not believe that their child had behavioral problems.

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This dissertation investigates the effect of obesity on labor market outcomes. Obesity is important for labor market outcomes. Obese people may be discriminated against by consumers or employers due to their distaste for obese people. Employers also may not want to hire obese people due to the expected health cost if the employers provide health insurance to their employees. Because of those consumers' and employers' distaste for obese people or because of these different costs, being obese may result in poor labor market outcomes in terms of wages and/or the likelihood of being employed, as well as sorting of obese people into jobs where slimness is not rewarded. This study used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). The NLSY79 provides panel information for a nationally representative sample of 12,686 young men and women who were 14 to 22 years old when first surveyed in 1979. The sample was followed for 14 years. Labor market outcomes were measured by (1) the probability of employment, and (2) the probability of holding occupations where slimness potentially rewards hourly wages. Weight was measured by Body Mass Index (BMI). All results were assessed separately by gender as a function of BMI splines and other controls. The endogeneity of BMI was controlled in a two-stage instrumental variable estimation model with over-identifying exogenous individual and state-level instruments, controlling for individual fixed effects. The Heckman selection model was used to control for the selection into the labor force, with the state-level identifying instruments of the nonemployment rate, the number of business establishments, and the number of Social Security Program beneficiaries. Results show that gaining weight adversely affects labor market outcomes for women, but the effect is mixed for men overall. The size and direction of the effects vary by gender, age groups, and type of occupations. Findings from this investigation could help our understanding of the economic cost of obesity to an individual beside its adverse effect on health. The spillover effect of obesity will increase the total cost of obesity to both individuals and society as a whole.

Bibliography Citation

Han, Euna. The Effect of Obesity on Labor Market Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006..

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My research focuses on how labor market dynamics are different across ability. In this dissertation, I explore the impact of individual ability on the cyclicality of employment rates over the business cycle and non-employment duration. Then I provide a human capital model with learning-by-doing and heterogeneous learning ability to explain the differences in observed labor market dynamics across ability. In chapter one, I discuss the Armed Forces Qualification Test as a measure of ability. Then, I provide some empirical evidence which shows that high ability workers are more attached to the labor market than low ability workers. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 shows that high ability workers have higher employment rates, less pro-cyclical employment rates, and shorter non-employment duration than low ability workers. At the same time, workers with high ability have higher wage levels and wage growth rates than low ability workers. I suggest that a human capital model with learning-by-doing and heterogeneous learning ability can explain high labor supply from high ability workers, because current labor supply increases future human capital which delivers higher labor income in the future.

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In the first chapter, I investigate how two different kinds of uncertainty jointly affect young workers' decisions. This paper introduces the possibility of multidimensional learning about worker ability and job match quality into a model of work decisions. This mechanism has a unique prediction, negative sorting into job mobility that fades away over time, which is verified in the NLSY79 data if the AFQT score carries over some information unused by workers and employers. I estimate the structural model, which also has flexible skill accumulation, by indirect inference. From simulation results on earnings dynamics, I find that the contribution of job shopping to average earnings growth is higher than previous estimates; also, individual heterogeneity in earnings growth is mostly explained by the process of resolving uncertainties.

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The first essay uses National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Child and Mother data to examine the effect of Head Start participation on childhood weight outcomes. This essay uses sibling comparisons to determine the impact of Head Start on children's Body Mass Index (BMI) z-scores as well as overweight and obesity status at ages 5/6 and 9/10. Empirical results show that while Head Start has limited effect on weight outcomes within the general population, the program is associated with a reduction in overweight and obesity among white and Hispanic children. Black Head Start children, on the other hand, are more likely to be overweight and obese at ages 5/6 than their non-Head Start peers. There is some evidence that Head Start influences weight outcomes through parental learning and shaping of children's preferences and behavior.

Bibliography Citation

Hanbury, Meagan Morrow. The U.S. Safety Net and Obesity. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California at Davis, 2013.

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Aim . The overarching goal of this research is to investigate whether cannabis involvement predicts later development of depression after accounting for differences between those involved with cannabis and comparison individuals.

Materials and methods . Two longitudinal datasets are utilized to address this potential causal association. The first is an ongoing longitudinal survey of 12,686 males and females beginning in 1979 from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), a nationally representative sample from the United States. In the 1994 follow-up interview, 8,759 adults (age range 29-37 years) had complete data on past-year adult cannabis use and current depression. Individual's probability to use cannabis was predicted through a propensity score approach using over 50 baseline covariates. The second dataset is from an observational prospective cohort study of 2,311 first-grade children enrolled in 1985-1986 as part of the Johns Hopkins University, Prevention Research Center (PRC) randomized trial of classroom-based preventive interventions. In the young adult follow-up interview, 1,494 adults (age range 19-24 years) had complete data on early-onset cannabis problems and young adult major depression. Both studies utilized new causal inference statistical techniques, known broadly as propensity score techniques. Observed confounding covariate differences were controlled through the estimation and application of propensity score techniques. Numerous propensity score techniques exist, yet few guidelines are available to aid researchers in choosing the best technique for a specific dataset and research question. Propensity score estimation and application techniques are described and a taxonomic approach is proposed to guide selection of the best techniques for these data.

Results . In the NLSY dataset, after using propensity score adjustment, the odds of current depression among past-year cannabis users was only 1.1 times higher than the comparison group (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.8, 1.7). After applying the best propensity score technique to use for the PRC dataset, the risk of young adult depression for the recent-onset cannabis problem using females was not statistically significantly different from the risk among the comparison females (Odds Ratio (OR): 0.68, 95% CI: 0.20, 2.34). The risk of young adult depression among the early-onset cannabis problem using males was positive, but still not statistically significantly different from the comparison males (OR: 1.72, 95% CI: 0.77, 3.60).

Discussion . Similar inferences may be drawn from both studies testing the potential causal link between cannabis and depression. After adjusting for differences in baseline confounders of cannabis use and depression, past-year cannabis use was not a significant predictor of current depression among adults. For adolescents, although the estimated association was higher for males, the qualitative difference in risk for males and females and the lack of statistical significance for either gender did not support claims of a causal association.

Conclusion . These data do not support the hypothesis that there is a causal link between cannabis and depression.

How Aspirations Are Formed and Challenged in the Transition to Adulthood and Implications for Adult Well-Being
Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Sociology, 2009
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
CESD (Depression Scale); Depression (see also CESD); Job Satisfaction; Mobility, Social; National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS); Occupational Aspirations

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Aspirations play a primary role in linking social class background to later attainment. Planful adolescents who formulate ambitious educational and occupational goals are more likely to succeed than those who hold modest expectations. Yet we know little about the process by which young people choose and develop aspirations or the barriers they face in attempting to achieve these goals. This dissertation aims to fill this gap, by asking how structural factors shape the choices young people make regarding their educational and occupational futures, how the ability to follow through on these choices is distributed, and how failing to meet one's chosen goals may impact individuals' job satisfaction and psychological well-being.

The first chapter uses in-depth interviews with 61 junior and senior high school girls to show how social class shapes educational and occupational aspirations and plans through the availability and use of social networks. These interviews reveal that middle class adolescents are embedded in resource-rich social networks that facilitate high educational and occupational attainment while limited social ties, family instability, and parental disengagement produce disadvantages for working class and poor youth. The second chapter uses survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) to explore the relationship between events in the transition to adulthood and fulfillment of one's educational and occupational expectations. Findings reveal that the order and timing of family formation and dissolution events can disrupt young people's paths to attainment in early adulthood. The final chapter uses NLSY79 and NELS datasets to test the relationship between falling short of one's expectations and emotional and psychological outcomes in early adulthood. Results indicate that occupational expectations can serve as baseline standard with which to judge later accomplishments--falling short of these goals leads to lower emotional and psychological well-being in adulthood. These findings support the claims of relative deprivation theory, which argues that dissatisfaction arises from the gap between what one has and what one wants.

Bibliography Citation

Hardie, Jessica H. How Aspirations Are Formed and Challenged in the Transition to Adulthood and Implications for Adult Well-Being. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Sociology, 2009.

Race, Self-Assessed Health, and the Healthy Worker Effect in a Cohort of Older Men
Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, 2006. DAI-B 68/01, Jul 2007
Cohort(s):
Older Men
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Racial Differences; Self-Reporting; Socioeconomic Factors; Socioeconomic Status (SES)

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A common method of measuring general health is by asking the respondent a straightforward question like "In general, how would you rate your health?" This self-assessed health (SAH) response is a subjective measure and may be influenced by the culture and social environment so that responses between different populations may not be comparable. In particular, black respondents may evaluate SAH differently from white respondents.

In the first part of this dissertation, I examine racial differences in SAH using the Older Men cohort of the Dept. of Labor's National Longitudinal Surveys. I find that blacks are more likely to report poor SAH than whites, but much of this difference is accounted for by socio-economic differences. For both blacks and whites, functional health is the primary correlate of poor SAH. However, leisure time and rural roots are significantly associated with poor SAH in blacks but not in whites. Still, the pervasive influence of functional health on poor SAH leads me to conclude that there is a high degree of comparability between black and white assessments of poor SAH. In the second part of the dissertation, I use poor SAH to characterize difference in the healthy worker effect by race. I find that the difference in the proportion with poor SAH between workers and non-workers is about twice as large in the black cohort than in the white cohort. However, much of the difference is accounted for by socio-economic status. However, I also find that after adjusting for SES, whites unable to work are about 1.4 times as likely to report poor SAH than blacks unable to work.

The use of SAH as a response in epidemiological studies of men where race is a factor appears to be justified when results are adjusted for SES. The use of SAH as a response in occupational studies of men where race is a factor is also justified when results are adjusted for SES as long as the cohorts studied exclude those unable to work. Among those unable to work, there are differences in how white males and black males report poor SAH.

Bibliography Citation

Harris, Gerald Alan. Race, Self-Assessed Health, and the Healthy Worker Effect in a Cohort of Older Men. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, 2006. DAI-B 68/01, Jul 2007.

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This dissertation discusses results obtained by formulating and estimating a dynamic stochastic model of individuals' annual joint decisions of occupation, hours worked, and schooling. A standard dynamic occupational choice model is augmented by allowing body weight to affect the non-monetary costs and distribution of wages for each occupation. The model also captures the effects of individuals' employment decisions on body weight in subsequent periods through on-job activity levels, disposable income and time available for leisure. Conditional density estimation is used to model the stochastic evolution of body weight and formulate the distributions of wages in each occupation. I estimate the model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and Occupational Information Network. Results suggest individuals with higher body weight are likely to incur wage penalties in occupations with intense social requirements. Further, individuals with excess body weight earn lower returns to experience and face greater switching costs in white-collar occupations than healthy weight individuals. Simulating the model with estimated parameters, I find that halving the weight-specific frictions in switching occupations reduces the gap in wages between the obese and non-obese by 12%. Further, an exogenous reduction in an individual's initial body mass by 10% leads to a 1.5% increase in wages over the life course, and increases the probability of attaining employment in professional occupations by 5%.

Bibliography Citation

Harris, Matt. What is the Full Cost of Body Mass in the Workplace? Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013.

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This study examines a range of GED recipients' life course contexts and experiences and their relationship with long-term outcomes. Using descriptive comparisons, bivariate tests, and propensity-score matched regression models to analyze data from rounds 1-15 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997, analyses aim to examine: (1) differential adolescent experiences and contexts between GED recipients and high school graduates; (2) whether differences in adult outcomes between GED recipients and high school graduates can be minimized by accounting for these adolescent contexts and experiences; and (3) adolescent predictors of positive adult outcomes for GED recipients. Additional analyses examine differences in adolescence between GED recipients who went on to obtain a postsecondary credential and those who did not and identify predictors of postsecondary attainment within the GED recipient group.

Findings revealed that GED recipients' contexts and experiences in adolescence were characterized by greater risk exposure (e.g., gang involvement, teen parenthood) in comparison to high school graduates. Collectively, these differences revealed that more risk factors were present in GED recipients' lives long before they dropped out of high school. Even after accounting for a range of factors from multiple ecological domains in adolescence, GED recipients still had significantly lower household income-to-poverty ratios and lower rates of postsecondary educational attainment than their high school graduate counterparts. However, their general and behavioral health (e.g., alcohol misuse, exercise behaviors) outcomes were either equivalent or better than high school graduates' outcomes. Looking within the GED recipient group, recipients who eventually completed a postsecondary credential differed in adolescence from those who did not on a number of factors, such as engagement in risky behavior and parental education.

Overall, findings suggest that differences between GED recipients and high school graduates existed in a range of ecological domains in adolescence and accounting for these differences attenuated differences in these two groups' outcomes in adulthood in some cases but not in others. Findings also suggest that GED recipients with a postsecondary credential had different adolescent experiences than recipients without a postsecondary credential. These results signal points for prevention, early intervention, and support for recipients post-GED receipt.

Bibliography Citation

Hartigan, Lacey. General Education Development (GED) Recipients' Life Course Experiences: Humanizing the Findings. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, University of Washington, 2017.

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This thesis is a compilation of three papers that study how various factors influence educational outcomes. The first paper, "The Benefits of Athletic Participation: Heterogeneous Effects on Academic and Labor Market Outcomes," focuses on sports participation in schools. It shows that athletic participants have higher GPAs, increased high school graduation rates, greater schooling attainment beyond high school, and higher wages compared to non-participants. In addition the gains from participation are concentrated in underachieving populations participating in team sports. This paper argues that improved outcomes arise from institutional performance incentives and the development of human capital.

The second paper, "The Influence of Height on Academic Outcomes," explores the relationship between height and educational achievement. Taller students earn higher grades, are more likely to graduate from high school, and attain more years of schooling. However, this height effect varies across school size: height has a stronger correlation with outcomes for students from bigger schools. These results imply that intelligence alone does not drive the association between height and outcomes. Differential access to activities such as school sports plays a role in driving these results.

Finally, the third paper, "The Effect of Menarche on Education: Explaining Black-White Differences," looks at the relationship between developmental timing in girls and their educational outcomes. A girl's developmental timing, marked by age at menarche, is strongly correlated with educational attainment. However, the direction of this correlation varies by race. Among the white population, delayed menarche is associated with improved educational outcomes while among the black population, it is associated with worse outcomes. Different responses to pregnancy driven by variance in marriage market quality across race can explain part of this relationship. Absent pregnancy, differing
marriage patterns across race may also contribute to the trends between menarche and achievement. Evidence suggests that endogenous factors such as health, which influence both development and outcomes, can not explain the varying relationship between age at menarche and education across race.

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The primary aims of this research are to explore the factors that determine the amount of time that women in two cohorts spend out of the labor force after their first birth, and to investigate if postpartum time out of work has an influence on two factors of women's wellbeing: marital quality and mental health. In this project, I conduct both descriptive and analytical investigations of the longitudinal data from two cohorts of nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youths (1979 and 1997 cohorts).

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This dissertation explores the associations between long- and short-term exposure to neighborhood social and socioeconomic context and GWG using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It additionally investigates associations between objective and perceived measures of neighborhood social context in relation to GWG. The first paper investigates associations between long-term, cumulative neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and GWG. The second paper investigates associations between objectively measured and perceptions of point-in-time neighborhood social environment and GWG. Objective neighborhood social environment is measured using neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation. Perceived neighborhood social environment is assessed from women's self-report of problems within their neighborhood environment. The final paper in this dissertation conducts a systematic review of the literature to characterize the reporting error associated with use of self-reported, pregnancy-related weight in efforts to move the field toward developing bias correction techniques to address methodological limitations of this measure. While not directly related to understanding neighborhoods and GWG, this issue is relevant to future studies in this area that rely on self-reported weight.

Bibliography Citation

Headen, Irene. Associations Between Long- and Short-Term Exposure to Neighborhood Social Context and Pregnancy-Related Weight Gain. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Epidemiology, University of California, Berkeley, 2015.

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The purpose of this research was to investigate the ceteris paribus effect of consumer risk preferences on the decision to enroll in higher education. A sample from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97) was analyzed by using logistic regression to model the likelihood of higher education enrollment among young adults. Using the NLSY97 allowed for strong individual-level controls in the empirical model, including explanatory variables that have been consistently demonstrated in the literature to predict college enrollment. In addition to the standard individual-level controls, this study advanced the understanding of enrollment decisions by including measures for time preferences, subjective perceptions of risk in pursuing higher education, and risk preferences, all of which were identified as important predictors in a risky human capital theoretical model. Since the literature regarding human capital accumulation and the returns to education is vast and spans multiple disciplines, this research also contributes to the literature by providing a thorough review of research and theoretical models across disciplines.

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In the first example, The Dog that Didn't Bark: What Item Nonresponse Shows about Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Ability, I show that what survey respondents choose not to answer (item nonresponse) provides a useful task based measure of cognitive ability (e.g., IQ) and non-cognitive ability (e.g., Conscientiousness). Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), I find consistent correlation between item nonresponse and traditional measures of IQ and Conscientiousness. I also find that item nonresponse is more strongly correlated with earnings in the SOEP than traditional measures of either IQ or Conscientiousness. I also use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) Gold Standard, which has no explicit measure of either cognitive or non-cognitive ability, to show that item nonresponse predicts earnings from self-reported and administrative sources. Consistent with previous work showing that Conscientiousness and IQ are positively associated with longevity, I document that item nonresponse is associated with decreased mortality risk. My findings suggest that item nonresponse provides an important measure of cognitive and non-cognitive ability that is contained on every survey.

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According to Census estimates, Hispanics accounted for half the population growth in the U.S. between 2000 and 2004. Despite this fast growth, few research studies have focused on the labor market opportunities of Hispanic women. The first chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of Hispanic-white women's wage differentials in order to establish what the wage gap is as well as identify its possible sources. Using the Census, results suggest there exists a large wage gap between Hispanic and white non-Hispanic women. Like previous studies, differences in education and potential experience explain a large portion of the gap; however, those studies do not consider state of residence. The use of state fixed effects in the current analysis imply that not controlling for geographical location masks wage disadvantages experienced by Hispanics relative to white non-Hispanics.

The second chapter furthers the first chapter's analysis by using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) in order to reconcile the varying estimates of estimated wage gaps in the previous literature using the NLSY. Results suggest that differences in sample design as well as control variables used have a large impact on the size and sign of wage gap estimates. Estimates that take into account differences in test scores are typically positive in previous studies implying a Hispanic wage advantage. However, results presented show how accounting for state fixed effects produces negative estimates even with test score controls, further suggesting the importance of location in examining Hispanic wage outcomes.

The last chapter analyzes the effect of selection bias on estimated Hispanic-white women's wage gaps. Previous studies generally find the wage disadvantages experienced by Hispanic women are explained by relatively low levels of human capital. These results are based on observed wages of working women, however, and there are ethnic differences in who selects into labor force participation. Using the NLSY, results presented find that accounting for the wages of non-participant women widens the disparity in wage offerings between Hispanic and white non-Hispanic women than what is normally estimated using the wages observed by working women alone.

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Among the most significant social trend of the second half of the twentieth century is the involvement of women, especially mothers, in the labor market. Relatedly, patterns of childcare arrangements have changed dramatically during this time period. Research establishes many factors including gender ideology, career aspirations, and occupational structures affect women's choices regarding employment and childcare. However, the relationship between workplace structures, specifically, access to workplace benefits, and maternal employment and childcare behaviors requires further specification. We also know little about how changes in women's jobs affect increases in maternal employment and in non-maternal childcare arrangements. This research uses two cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience to examine the impact of workplace structures, including access to workplace policies, on mother's labor force participation and choice of childcare arrangements. Results identify significant cohort differences in the likelihood of employment following childbirth. Access to benefits, namely medical insurance and company provided childcare, increase the odds of employment and account for variation between the two cohorts. There are not significant differences in the likelihood of working full-time versus part-time among employed mothers. Yet workplace benefits increase the odds of full-time hours. The more recent cohort of women is more likely to use maternal childcare than relative care. However, once employment status is considered, there are not significant cohort differences in the probability of using maternal care over non-relative care. Among employed women, access to flexible hours and company provided childcare do not significantly impact childcare arrangements, but workplace characteristics such as hours worked and job shift, lead to greater use of non-maternal child care. Implications for women's labor market participation and the efficacy of family friendly policies for narrowing the gender gap in employment behaviors are discussed.

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Professionals have a tendency to employ treatment-based approaches or palliative care with little regard for removing the causes of conditions using preventive interventions or behavior-change programming efforts. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between the parenting style received in childhood and the potential for criminal behavior as an adult in order to aid in preventative interventions to help at-risk youth. The research design of the current study was based on the secondary analysis of data from the NLSY97 data set. One MANOVA was conducted to assess the impacts of parenting style and race on deviant, delinquent, and criminal involvement. A second MANOVA was conducted to assess the impact of parenting style on deviant, delinquent, and criminal behavior over time. When examined separately, total number of arrests and delinquency scores were highest for children of parents with neglecting or authoritarian parenting styles. Total number of arrests and total number of incarcerations were higher for Black respondents than for Hispanic or White respondents, while White respondents had significantly higher mean delinquency scores than Black respondents. A measure of criminal and delinquent behavior was summed across three timeframes; results showed no significant impact of parenting style on any of the three timeframes or on the combined dependent variables. Parenting style is one of the many factors of juvenile delinquency, and it is hoped that this study will inform all individuals interacting with children of the importance of implementing early intervention, awareness, and respect across multi-disciplinarians.

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Although most adolescents do not frequently engage in delinquency, the majority do participate in criminal behavior at some point during their formative years. What accounts for the small minority who abstain entirely? Moffitt's (1993) life-course persistent and adolescent-limited model of offending suggests that abstention can be a function of a smaller-than-normal maturity gap, structural barriers to delinquency learning opportunities, atypical personal characteristics, or some combination of these. Although some empirical attention has been given to the atypical personal traits proposition, no research to date has examined Moffitt's abstention thesis in its entirety. A complete test requires an examination of the ways in which abstainers differ from non-abstainers, as well as from one another. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: Children and Young Adults (n=5,003), latent trajectory analysis is presented to produce delinquency taxonomies, to evaluate key theoretical predictors of abstention, and to elaborate on the distinguishing characteristics between abstaining and non-abstaining adolescents. Following this, latent class analysis is used to examine within-group heterogeneity, highlighting unique variation in developmental traits among abstaining youths. Models predicting the odds of taxonomy membership indicate some support for each of Moffitt's abstention propositions. Additionally, results from latent class analysis confirm that not all abstainers are alike and support the notion that there are both prosocial and antisocial modes of abstention. These findings may help to clarify inconsistent findings from past studies and they are potentially informative for understanding the early precursors to delayed criminal careers.

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An important part of almost every student's high school experience is participation in an extracurricular activity. Many schools encourage their students to participate in these voluntary activities because they build skills that may not be taught in the classroom, but may be important in becoming successful in school and in the community. Extracurricular activities put students in leadership positions, teach them team work, and can instill a confidence in their abilities. Previous research has shown that participation in extracurricular activities in high school can affect labor market conditions and educational achievements, but few studies have differentiated the impacts of different types of extracurricular activities on earnings and educational attainment. This paper examines the academic and labor market effects of participating in a performing arts activity in high school. The arts are of particular interest because the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 lists it as a core academic course. The core courses are believed to increase the academic attainment of students, and are eligible for increased federal funding based on "scientifically-based research" (Arts Education Partnership, 2005; Arts Education Partnership, 2006, p. 4). A major problem in program evaluation is the possibility of selection bias due to the non-randomized way individuals self-select into activities. To reduce the bias, a treatment effects model is estimated using the covariate matching technique. I use the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to test my hypotheses.

Bibliography Citation

Henry, Thomas Charles. The Effects of High School Performing Arts Participation on Educational and Occupational Attainment. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Finance and Economics, Mississippi State University, August 2011.

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Building upon the psychological and sociological models of how antisocial behavior develops, the study assesses how individual characteristics, neighborhood networks, and family processes impact female and male adolescent trajectories of delinquent behavior. The study examines three central questions regarding adolescent delinquency: (1) What are the predictors of initiation of delinquency by early adolescence? (2) Among high risk adolescents, how do demographic characteristics, contextual factors, and family processes influence the patterns of engagement in delinquent behaviors? (3) How do the associations between demographics, neighborhood characteristics, and family processes and delinquency differ for girls versus boys?

Six waves of data are derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Analyses employ a subsample ( n = 4753) of adolescents who were between the ages of 12-14 and engaged in delinquent activities at the first round of data collection. Logistic regression results indicate that the odds of engaging in delinquency increased if the individual is older, male, involved in a gang, disengaged from school, and exposed to more violence. A series of growth models focusing on the subset of adolescents who engaged in some level of delinquency suggest that individual, neighborhood, and family processes predict adolescent trajectories of delinquency. Specifically, females begin at higher initial levels of delinquency and have a slower rate of change, while minority status indicates starting at a lower initial level and a slower rate of change in delinquent activities. Measures of negative community influences suggest higher initial levels but slower growth in delinquency. Positive family processes indicate lower initial levels of delinquency. Overall, these predictors of delinquent trajectories are similar for males and females. Experiencing violence at an early age was the only characteristic that significantly differed between males and females, predicting increases in delinquency over time for males. Results suggest numerous avenues for research, intervention, and policy. Broader implications for policy, such as providing adolescents with opportunities to serve in crime prevention efforts in their communities, are also discussed.

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In Chapter 1, "Does it Pay to Delay? Decomposing the Effect of First Birth Timing on Women's Wage Growth", I estimate the effect of the timing of a woman's first child on her wage path, and decompose this effect to establish the mechanism by which timing affects wages. Relying on fertility instruments to address possible endogeneity, I find that a one-year delay increases women's wage growth over the first 15 years of her career by 3 to 5 percent. I then assess the mechanism by which timing affects wages by considering its intermediate effect on factors central to theories of wage growth. I find that the three most important economic channels speak to the influence of timing on the pattern of human capital accumulation: hours worked, the length of the longest labor force exit, and schooling. I also find that their relative importance varies by education. Whereas for college graduates the influence of fertility delay arises most strongly from its effect on time off from work (thus protecting human capital from depreciation), for those with less education the more relevant channel is through hours worked (the accumulation of general human capital on the job).

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Empirical studies have identified late adolescence and early adulthood as a period of the life course marked by relatively high levels of change in religious belief, practice, and identity. Young people are most likely to decline in religious service attendance, but they are also likely to disaffiliate, convert, or change particular religious beliefs during this phase of the life course. Despite this, researchers have paid little attention to the social sources of these changes with the exception of the study of family formation and religious participation. This work in this dissertation begins to address this important arena of religious change by establishing a general life course framework which emphasizes the exogenous social forces that constrain and enable actors in their religious worlds. Primary focus is given to two substantive areas: (1) the influence from religious socialization and context in early adolescence on later pathways of religious participation, and (2) the influence from higher education on religious participation, beliefs, and affiliation.

These research questions are primarily analyzed through panel data in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 surveys. Several key findings emerge. Religious participation in the form of religious service attendance follows multiple pathways in late adolescence and early adulthood. Decline in attendance is most common during adolescence, while the proportion declining in their early twenties is approximately equal to the proportion increasing in attendance. Further analysis reveals that religious traditions, household religious socialization, and peer church attendance in early adolescence influence the relative risk of decline versus stability during the transition to adulthood. Conversely, demographic characteristics such as gender and race, along with residing in the South, during early adolescence are key predictors of who increases religious attendance during late adolescence and early adulthood.

Analysis of the influence of education attainment on religious practice, belief and affiliation finds no overall decline in belief and affiliation as a result of higher education. Further analysis reveals that college educated Catholics do not follow this general trend and are more likely to have lower salience of faith and disaffiliate. Educated African Americans, conversely show an increase in salience of faith and a lower likelihood of disaffiliation. College type also matters with students attending Catholic and mainline Protestant affiliated colleges declining in attendance more than students at other public and private colleges and universities. A comparison with the birth cohort that attended college during the late 1960s and early 1970s reveals that college had a stronger secularizing effect in the past.

Bibliography Citation

Hill, Jonathan P. Religious Pathways During the Transition to Adulthood: A Life Course Approach. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2008.

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I propose a new approach to measuring character skills. In the following three essays, my co-authors and I measure the effort that adolescent students appear to put forward on surveys and tests. First, I examine the extent to which students simply skip questions or plead ignorance on surveys. Second, I develop new methods for detecting careless answers, those instances in which students appear to be "just filling in the bubbles." I show, using longitudinal datasets, that both measures are predictive of educational degree attainment, independent of measured cognitive ability and other demographic factors. Finally, I demonstrate that international differences in reading, math and science test scores appear in fact to partially reflect international differences in student effort on assessments. Just as some students skip questions and carelessly answer surveys, some students do the same on tests. To the extent that effort on surveys and tests reflects noncognitive skills, presumed international differences in cognitive ability (as measured by standardized tests) might in fact be driven by differences in noncognitive ability. Altogether, the measures explored in the paper present three new methods for quantifying student character skills, which can be used in future research. Throughout, my co-authors and I posit that the character skills that our measures capture are related to conscientiousness and self-control. [Author uses NLSY79 and NLSY97 in first essay]

Bibliography Citation

Hitt, Collin. Character Assessment: Three Essays. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Education Policy, University of Arkansas, 2016.

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In the first chapter of this dissertation I develop a flexible and estimable equilibrium model that jointly considers location decisions of heterogeneous agents across space, and their optimal portfolio decisions. Merging continuous-time asset pricing with urban economics models, I find a unique sorting equilibrium and derive equilibrium house and asset prices in closed-form. Risk premia for homes depend on both aggregate and local idiosyncratic risks, and equilibrium returns for stocks depend on their correlation with city-specific income and house price risk. In equilibrium, very risk-averse households do not locate in risky cities although they may have a high productivity match with those cities. I estimate a version of this model using house price and wage data at the metropolitan area level and provide estimates for risk premia for different cities. The estimated risk premia imply that homes are on average about $20000 cheaper than they would be if owners were risk-neutral. This estimate is over $100000 for volatile coastal cities. I simulate the model to study the effects of financial innovation on equilibrium outcomes. For reasonable parameters, creating assets that correlate with city-specific risks increase house prices by about 20% and productivity by about 10%. The average willingness to pay for completing markets per homeowner is between $10000 and $20000. Productivity is increased due to a unique channel: lowering the amount of non-insurable risk decreases the households' incentive to sort on these risks, which leads to a more efficient allocation of human capital in the economy.

The second chapter of this dissertation studies ability signaling in a model of employer learning and statistical discrimination. In traditional signaling models, education provides a way for individuals to sort themselves by ability. Employers in turn use education to statistically discriminate, paying wages that reflect the average productivity of workers with the same given level of education. In this chapter, we provide evidence that graduating from college plays a much more direct role in revealing ability to the labor market. Using the NLSY79, our results suggest that ability is observed nearly perfectly for college graduates. In contrast, returns to AFQT for high school graduates are initially very close to zero and rise steeply with experience. As a result, from very beginning of the career, college graduates are paid in accordance with their own ability, while the wages of high school graduates are initially unrelated to their own ability. This view of ability revelation in the labor market has considerable power in explaining racial differences in wages, education, and the returns to ability. In particular, we find a 6-10 percent wage penalty for blacks (conditional on ability) in the high school market but a small positive black wage premium in the college labor market. These results are consistent with the notion that employers use race to statistically discriminate in the high school market but have no need to do so in the college market.

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Chapter 1 estimates the compensating differential with moral hazard. I show that, in an environment of asymmetric information, the wage premium of an unpleasant job attribute not only includes the compensating differential but also the economic rent that stimulates worker effort. The wage premium is equal to the compensating differential if and only if workers are perfectly monitored. Estimates of a structural model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth find that the wage premium of risky jobs is 6.6%, which is decomposed into a compensating differential that accounts for 2.8% and an efficiency wage premium that accounts for 3.8%. Since the wage premium is interpreted as the compensating differential in a hedonic wage regression, the results show that the reduced-form estimate of the compensating differential has upward bias.

A Life Course Perspective on Foster Care: An Examination of the Impact on Variations in Levels of Involvement in the Foster Care System on Adult Criminality and Other Indicators of Adult Well-being
Ph.D. Dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2005. DAI-A 66/10, Apr 2006
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Crime; Family Studies; Foster Care; Life Course; Modeling, Logit

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This study examined the relationship between level of involvement in the foster care system and several adult indicators of well-being across the life course using original qualitative data and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The qualitative data were collected from foster care experienced adults, foster parents, caseworkers and judges. The results from the qualitative data follow a pattern similar to that of prior research: foster care experienced adults have difficulty transitioning out of foster care to independence. They experienced difficulty with relationships, finances, housing and several other difficulties. The quantitative results were derived from bivariate analyses and multivariate analyses using ordinary least squares regression and logistic regression. The quantitative analyses tested the ability of social control theory and differential association theory to explain various indicators of adult well-being. Overall, both theories did partially explain why reunified and aged-out youths have less positive adult outcomes than the general population, though, differential association did explain the association more than social control theory. A major result of this study demonstrated, by using refined measures of foster care involvement, that those who were reunified with their families had more negative adult outcomes than those individuals who aged out of foster care. This study highlights the need to use mainstream sociological theory in research on foster care and the need to use more refined indicators of foster care involvement

Bibliography Citation

Holland, Donna Dea. A Life Course Perspective on Foster Care: An Examination of the Impact on Variations in Levels of Involvement in the Foster Care System on Adult Criminality and Other Indicators of Adult Well-being. Ph.D. Dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2005. DAI-A 66/10, Apr 2006.

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This study compares the "occupational careers," defined as long-term occupational trajectories, of men between the ages of 22 and 30 from two cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS). The first cohort was ages 14-22 in 1966, the second cohort was ages 14-22 in 1979. The study seeks to answer three questions. First, what is the best way to measure and classify occupational careers within the NLS data? I test two approaches to this problem. The first approach involved a case-by-case analysis of the work histories of 200 men randomly selected from the data. The second approach involved the application of optimal matching techniques. The results from the two approaches suggested that boundaries exist between different types of occupations and that careers tend to be defined by work primarily within one of these bounded areas.

The second question addressed in this study is how occupational careers have changed over time. I found several changes in the types of occupational careers between the two cohorts. The second cohort had lower levels of white-collar, craft, and unionized blue-collar careers than the earlier cohort, and much higher levels of low-skill/unemployed careers. I also found that year to year occupational instability increased in the second cohort, although most of this increased instability occurred within career types rather than from people crossing the boundaries between careers. This increase in occupational instability calls into question the idea the New Economy.

The final question addressed by this study is how the changes occupational careers between the two cohorts affected opportunities for upward mobility. I found that opportunities for mobility declined in the second cohort, mostly due to the decline of craft and unionized blue-collar careers. I find little evidence, however, that occupational instability is particularly detrimental for disadvantaged men or that it played a major role in changing mobility rates.

Bibliography Citation

Hollister, Matissa Nicole. Careers in a Changing Economy: Occupations and Intergenerational Mobility Among Two Cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys. Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 2006. DAI-A 67/02, August 2006..

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Chapter 3 lays out a more comprehensive, multilevel framework for structural sexism and examines how it shapes the health of women and men at midlife. I measure macro-level structural sexism at the U.S. state-level using indicators of inequality in political, economic, cultural and reproductive domains. Using restricted geo-coded data from the NLSY79, individuals are located within states to capture their exposure to structural sexism. This chapter also incorporates individual- and spousal-level data from the NLSY79 in order to measure exposure to structural sexism at the meso- and micro-levels. Results show that among women exposure to more sexism at the macro- and meso-levels is associated with more chronic conditions, worse self-rated health, and worse physical functioning. Among men, macro-level structural sexism is also associated with worse health. However, at the meso-level greater structural sexism is associated with better health among men. At the micro-level, internalized sexism is not related to health among either women or men. These results highlight the importance of a multilevel approach.

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The purpose of this study was to examine ecological level correlates of peer and school externalizing behaviors among early adolescents (ages 12-14). The current research addressed the following hypotheses for the direct effects: learning problems, poverty, and peer and school externalizing behaviors at Time 1 (socio-demographics); negative peer influence (microsystem); living in a central city, compared with other urban and rural residence (exosystem); and lack of school rules (macrosystem) will be associated with an increase in peer and school externalizing behaviors at Time 2. Cognitive stimulation and emotional support, teacher involvement, and ease of making friends (microsystem), neighborhood safety (exosystem), and religious involvement (macrosystem) will be associated with a later decrease in peer and school externalizing behaviors. This study also tested several moderators. Positive teacher-student relationships will be associated with a decrease in peer and school externalizing behaviors more for Black and Hispanic youth than for white youth. Additionally, positive parenting (cognitive stimulation and emotional support) will be associated with a decrease in peer and school externalizing behaviors more for Black and Hispanic youth than for white youth. Moreover teacher involvement and ease of making friends will buffer the effects of having learning problems on exhibiting peer and school externalizing behaviors. Finally, I hypothesized that negative peer influence and neighborhood safety will mediate the effects of poverty status on peer and school externalizing behaviors.

To address these hypotheses, secondary data analysis was conducted, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The sample was drawn from the mother-child dataset, which included youth who in the first of two years, 2002 or 2004 (Time 1), were living with their mothers, enrolled in regular school, responded to at least one of the 13 items from the self-administered survey, and the mothers responded to at least one of the four items measuring peer and school externalizing behaviors in Time 1 and Time 2 (in 2004 for those entering the sample in 2002; in 2006 for those entering the sample for 2004). Multivariate hierarchical logistic regression model were estimated to address the hypotheses.

Findings from the study indicate that youth's learning problems and peer externalizing behavior at Time 1 were significantly associated with peer externalizing behavior at Time 2. When the microsystem variables were included in Model 2, ease of making friends was statistically significant. When the exosystem variables were added in Model 3, the neighborhood environment variables were all statistically significant, but none of the macrosystem variables were significant when added to Model 4. Concerning school externalizing behavior at Time 2, male gender and school externalizing behavior at Time 1 were statistically significant, and two microsystem variables--cognitive stimulation and negative peer influence--were significantly associated with school externalizing behavior at Time 2. None of the exosystem and macrosystem variables were associated with school externalizing behavior at Time 2. With regards to the moderators, I found that for Hispanics, higher levels of cognitive stimulation was associated with an increased risk of exhibiting school externalizing behavior, although the odds ratio indicated little practical significance. I also found that ease of making friends also moderated the effects of learning problems on school externalizing behavior at Time 2. With regards to the mediators, since no direct relationship between poverty and peer and school externalizing behaviors at Time 2 was found, no further tests for mediation were conducted.

Bibliography Citation

Hong, Jun Sung. Peer and School Externalizing Behaviors Among Early Adolescents: An Ecological Systems Analysis. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013.

Out of the Nest and into the Red: Three Essays on Debt in Young Adulthood
Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2011
Cohort(s):
NLSY79, NLSY97, Young Men, Young Women
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Assets; College Degree; Debt/Borrowing; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Student Loans; Transition, Adulthood

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The Great Recession of 2008 and rising costs of college have stoked popular and scholarly concern about young adult debt. Debt plays an important role in the lives of young people as they make the transition to adulthood, but little research has been conducted on the topic. This dissertation sheds light on the role of debt in the lives of young adults with three studies. The first study asks how indebtedness has changed across three cohorts of young adults in their twenties. The second and third studies examine how the acquisition of student loan debt is implicated in the early process of status attainment at a time when the cost of a college degree is high. To do this I draw on data from four different nationally representative surveys of young adults: The National Longitudinal Study of Men (1966 cohort), The National Longitudinal Study of Women (1968 cohort), The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 Cohort), and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (1997 cohort). The results show: (1) median debt has remained relatively stable over time, but young adults today have fewer assets than their predecessors and take on more unsecured debt, leading them to have higher debt burdens (e.g. higher debt to asset ratios); (2) Student loan debt acquisition is linked to young adults' social class of origin. Young people from well-educated or high-income families are relatively protected from debt. Moreover, the relationship between parents' income and student loan debt is nonlinear, such that young adults from middle-income families have a higher risk of debt than those from lower and higher income families; (3) Parents' education and young adult's postsecondary education interact to affect student loan debt. Parents' education acts as a safety net that reduces the positive correlation between postsecondary education and debt. Overall, the findings suggest that debt plays an important role in the lives of young adults as they become independent, and has become more bu
rdensome for young adults across cohorts. Debt also plays an important role in the early process of status attainment, particularly for young adults who use debt as a way to pay for college.

Bibliography Citation

Houle, Jason N. Out of the Nest and into the Red: Three Essays on Debt in Young Adulthood. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2011.

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Abstract There has been an upward trend in obesity among African American (AA) adolescents over the last 2 decades. While parenting characteristics (e.g., styles and practices) are linked to adolescent eating habits and weight status, related research has focused on European American children from 2-parent middle-class households or economically disadvantaged AA children from single mother households. The purpose of this quantitative secondary data analysis was to investigate the relationship between parenting characteristics on the weight status of adolescents aged 12 to 17 years ( n = 325) among a broader population of AA mothers and fathers residing both inside and outside of the home. The social cognitive theory, widely used in obesity intervention research, was the framework used to explore parental behaviors that contribute to adolescent weight status and health. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 was used to examine the relationship between parenting characteristics on adolescent weight status, as measured by body mass index (BMI) percentile. Statistical analysis included the Kruskal-Wallis Test, Mann-Whitney U, Spearman rho correlation, and hierarchical multiple regression. Results indicated no significant relationships between parenting characteristics and adolescent BMI percentiles as determined by Kruskal-Wallis and multiple regression analysis when controlled for sociodemographic variables. Study findings indicate that variables beyond parenting practices, such as urban/rural residence, must be considered to explain BMI and weight status among AA adolescents. Largely, this study increased knowledge on AA parenting characteristics and promotes education and social awareness of the continued weight epidemic that plagues AA children in the United States.

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The first chapter of this dissertation examines the short-term and long-term effects of parental problem-drinking on children's future educational and labor market outcomes. Results indicate that having a problem-drinking parent has negative consequences for children's education in the form of lower grades and less schooling. It is also associated with lower wages, longer periods of being out of the labor force, and longer spells of unemployment. The second chapter examines the relationship between varying, large sibling age gaps on the future educational and labor market outcomes of youngest children. Results differ by gender. A positive academic effect is seen for males who only have one sibling, when that sibling is between three and five years older. The opposite is true for females; positive effects are seen in the larger age gaps when the respondents have two older siblings.

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The objective of this research is to identify the factors that influence adults’ healthy weight, as reflected in body mass index (BMI) or being obese (having a body mass index of 30 or larger), the Food Stamp Program (or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) participation, and the relationship of these two in longitudinal panel data.

The panel data was obtained by merging the individual-level national data for the U.S. adults from the National Longitudinal Survey of the Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY79), with external price data obtained from the American Chamber of Commerce Research Association (ACCRA) Cost of Living Index. Six rounds of NLSY79 survey were extracted at a 4-year interval from 1986 to 2006. Using the geocode information, the secondary data on local food, drinks and health care prices and labor market conditions were merged with the data on adults in the NLSY79.

Bibliography Citation

Huang, Ying. An Econometric Study of the Impact of Economic Variables on Adult Obesity and Food Assistance Program Participation in the NLSY Panel. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, 2012.

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Education and training are crucial activities in enhancing productivity. This dissertation studies empirically the choices and outcomes of higher education and training in Canada. It consists of three articles.

The first article examines the determinants of participation in, and the amount of time spent on, public and private adult education and training in Canada. Using the data from the 1998 Adult Education and Training Survey, we estimate probit models of adult education and training incidence and hurdle models of total time spent in training. Consistent with the literature, we find that relatively advantaged workers acquire more training, often with financial help from their employers. Direct government-sponsored training represents a relative minor component of total training, and is not well targeted to the disadvantaged. We also find large provincial differences in the incidence of training.

The second article attempts to tackle the puzzle of why more Canadians choose community colleges over universities than their American counterparts, when previous research has suggested that the return to community college education is low in Canada. Using data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics for Canada and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 for the United States, I estimate earnings premium of education using various instruments and models. I find that Canadians have a relatively strong incentive to choose community colleges if occupational choices are controlled for. The self-selection processes in the two countries appear to be different.

The third article re-examines the "sheepskin" effect of educational credentials in Canada using data from the 1996 Census. I investigate the impact of relaxing the specification of the experience profile and the linear functional form assumption in the standard Mincer model on the estimates of sheepskin effects. I find that the estimated credential effects are sensitive to specifications. Regression analysis in the standard model is not adequate to control for the workers' productivity difference unrelated to the credentials. Misspecification of the earnings equation introduces biases into the estimates of credential effects. With carefully constructed comparison groups, the estimated sheepskin effects of a Bachelor's degree are smaller than that previously reported in the literature.

Bibliography Citation

Hui, Shek-Wai. On the Training and Education of Canadians. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Western Ontario (Canada), 2005. DAI-A 67/02, Aug 2006.

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Given the college- and career-readiness national education agenda and the demands of the 21st century labor market, the purpose of this study was to describe and compare the relationship between post-school employment outcomes and the completion of a secondary education career and technical education concentration among youth with disabilities. Specifically, this study examined the labor force participation, employment, wages, and receipt of fringe benefits up to 11 years after exiting high school among youth with disabilities who completed a CTE concentration as part of their overall high school course of study. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 which includes a nationally representative sample of youth who attended high school in the late 1990's and beginning of the 21st century was used. A subsample of this data containing youth with disabilities was utilized and their 2006 post-school outcomes were analyzed using logistic regression and ordinary least squares regression analyses.

The results suggest that youth with disabilities who complete a CTE concentration in high school have a higher likelihood of participating in the labor force, being employed, and earning higher wages up to 11 years beyond exiting high school controlling for household income, race, ethnicity, gender, location, and marital status. However, the likelihood that youth would have a job that provided fringe benefits was reduced for youth who concentrated in secondary CTE. Academic achievement, academic course-taking, and postsecondary degree attainment mitigated the effects of CTE on post-school employment outcomes. These findings emphasize the importance of CTE being utilized as a course of study option for youth with disabilities, especially for youth with disabilities who choose not to obtain a postsecondary degree. The findings also support the need for secondary CTE programs to integrate standards-based academic curricula and increase the facilitation of youth
with disabilities into postsecondary education.

Bibliography Citation

Hunter, Cherise Janelle. The Impact of Career and Technical Education on Post-School Employment Outcomes Among Youth with Disabilities. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2011.

Four Essays on a Student's Expectation That They Will Complete College
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Kentucky, 2017
Cohort(s):
NLSY97
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
College Graduates; Educational Aspirations/Expectations; Educational Attainment; Expectations/Intentions

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It has been common practice in the economics literature to utilize data on observed outcomes and negate what individuals believe or expect will happen in the future. Using responses to a unique set of questions in the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) I show that the literature could benefit in several ways by incorporating such data.

Bibliography Citation

Hunter, M. Gray. Four Essays on a Student's Expectation That They Will Complete College. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Kentucky, 2017.

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This thesis explores a Bayesian approach for four types of panel data models with interactive fixed effects: linear, dynamic tobit, probit, and linear with a nonhomogeneous block-wise factor structure. Monte Carlo simulation shows good estimation results for the linear dynamic panel data model with interactive fixed effects, even with the correlation between covariates and factor loadings and with multidimensional interactive fixed effects. This approach is applied to NLSY79 data with a balanced panel of 1831 individuals over 16 years (from 1984 to 2008) to study Mincer's human capital earnings function with unobserved skills and returns. The Mincer regression model is applied to the whole sample and to subgroups based on race and gender. This thesis also proposes estimation methods for tobit and probit models with interactive fixed effects. A data augmentation approach by Gibbs sampling is used to simulate latent dependent variable and latent factor structure, and I achieve good estimation results for both coefficient and factor structure.

This thesis also proposes a new type of model: the panel data model with a nonhomogeneous block-wise factor structure. Extensive literature exists in macroeconomics and finance on block-wise factor models; however, these block-wise factor structures are homogeneous, and the subjects do not change the blocks that they belong to. For example, in research about how business cycle variations are driven by different types of shocks related to regional or country-specific events, the macroeconomic variables of the United States will always belong to the North American block. However, we have a nonhomogeneous block-wise factor structure inside wage dynamics: as workers have different returns, or may be subjected to different productivity shocks for their unobserved skills in different regions (blocks), the regions where workers reside could also change over time. According to our balanced data set from NLSY79 for more than 20 years, 306 of 1831 (16.72%) workers moved across regions during the survey period, which cannot simply be ignored. This thesis proposes a set of identification conditions and estimation methods for this new type of model, and the Monte Carlo simulation yields very good estimation results. I also apply this model to study the NLSY79 balanced panel data, and find that the Northeast and the South have similar regional value patterns, while the Midwest and the West share similar patterns.

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Theory and research on the employment lives of the ex-incarcerated suggests that imprisonment can decrease earnings in the conventional labor market for young adults (e.g., Sampson and Laub, 1993; Sampson and Laub, 2003; Western, 2002; Western, 2006). However, little is known about the influence of imprisonment on criminal earnings. To fill this gap, the research reported below addresses the following question: How does incarceration influence criminal earnings for adolescents and young adults? Drawing on theories regarding stigma, social and human capital, and opportunity structure, I develop an argument to explain how incarceration can yield returns in the form of greater illegal earnings. Briefly, the case is made that due to failures in the conventional labor market, the ex-incarcerated are forced to rely on criminal earnings from illegal opportunity structures during the life course. Thus, illegal earnings will be greater for this group than for their counterparts who have not been incarcerated.

To assess the role of prior incarceration on illegal earnings, this study estimates random-effects models for adolescents and young adult male ex-offenders and non-offenders using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) for 1997-2005. Consistent with the theoretical arguments, the findings reveal that individuals with an incarceration history earn significantly higher annual illegal earnings than those who do not have such a history. This is true net of a variety of predictors of illegal income, including factors related to 'persistent heterogeneity'. The analyses also reveal an interaction effect of prior incarceration and African-American racial status on illegal earnings, whereby formerly incarcerated African-American males earn much higher predicted illegal income than former incarcerees from other race/ethnic backgrounds.

To assess the role of different sources of illegal earnings, I also investigated the influence of prior incarceration on illegal earnings from drug trafficking. These analyses demonstrated a strong positive relationship between incarceration history and annual illegal income from this source. Further, interaction models revealed that ex-incarcerated African-American males earn significantly higher predicted logged income from drug trafficking than Hispanic and White ex-offenders and those never incarcerated. There is also an interaction between prior incarceration and hardcore drug use for this outcome. Formerly incarcerated individuals who use hardcore drugs earn much higher predicted logged annual illegal income from drug sales than ex-incarcerated non-drug users, non-incarcerated drug users and non-incarcerated individuals that do not use drugs.

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This dissertation examines upward or downward assimilation by ethno-generation, a classification that considers a respondent's race or ethnicity as well as their generational status. In particular, I consider ethno-generational differences in college enrollment and completion in addition to the disruptive "turning point" events of high school dropout, early childbirth, arrest, and incarceration. This study focuses on distinctions between first and second-generation Mexicans and non-Hispanic whites and blacks. In addition, these analyses contrast first and second-generation Mexicans to third-generation Mexicans. This investigation also includes generational measures for Hispanics of "other" origin.
This study analyzes these outcomes while applying tests for a number of theories of assimilation. I consider straight-line assimilation theory, neo-assimilation theory, segmented assimilation theory, and second-generation immigrant optimism theory as potential theoretical frameworks that explain postsecondary success and disruptive life course events. This analysis employs the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, a nationally representative panel study that follows children aged 12-17 in 1997 throughout life documenting life course events and their experiences in school and the labor market. In addition to ethno-generational designations, I include measures for individual and family characteristics as well as time-varying life course measures.

Bibliography Citation

Inkpen, Christopher. Assimilation and the Timing of College Enrollment, Graduation, and Disruptive Events. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology and Criminology, The Pennsylvania State University, 2017.

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In communities of various socioeconomic levels, youths with low academic achievement may particularly benefit from role models. These role models may be family members, school teachers, or religious leaders. Although past research has examined the relationship between academic achievement and family factors, little research has examined community environment factors such as religious participation and community role models, on academic achievement. Guided by social cognitive theory, which indicates that cognitive abilities of attention, retention, and motivation could be modeled from participation in religious institutions, this quantitative study examined the extent to which religious participation, as measured through attendance rates, was related to achievement, as measured by scholastic achievement test (SAT) scores, among 765 youth records from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. General linear model analyses were conducted to examine the effect of religious attendance, moderated by income, on SAT scores. The results indicated that religious participation, for various socioeconomic levels, explained about 10% of the variance in SAT scores. The implications for social change include, for various socioeconomic groups, the promotion of parents' awareness of the benefits of religious participation in their preferred religious institution and the responsibility of such religious institutions to offer programs encouraging young people to seek higher education.

Obesity Over the Life Course: A Study of How Obesity Produces Health Disadvantage and Excess Mortality in the United States
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2015
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Disability; Modeling, Hazard/Event History/Survival/Duration; Obesity

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This dissertation explores the influence of obesity on U.S. population morbidity and mortality. Across three essays, I examine the relation of obesity to work disability, activity impairment, and mortality. Chapter 1 looks at how obesity in early adulthood affects work disability at young and middle ages. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979, I employ logistic regression to assess whether an early onset of obesity affects the likelihood of developing a work disabling condition and use event history analysis to predict the time at which that work disability occurs. Results indicate that early obesity increases the likelihood that a person will develop a work disability and uniformly increases the relative hazard of the disability occurring. The association of obesity and work disability remains robust to the inclusion of covariates and modeling the process that selects a person to become obese.

Bibliography Citation

Jackson, Heide. Obesity Over the Life Course: A Study of How Obesity Produces Health Disadvantage and Excess Mortality in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2015.

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Longitudinal designs are the gold standard for researchers studying within-subject changes in age-related development. These designs are typically conducted using a single cohort followed for a fixed period of time. However, single-cohort designs often necessitate a lengthy time commitment from participants, sponsors, and researchers which make them vulnerable to greater attrition and even premature termination. The time commitment for these designs also means that the results may be obsolete by the time they are published, particularly if the outcomes under study are sensitive to generational differences. Bell (1953) proposed the use of an Accelerated Longitudinal Design (ALD) as a means to generate age-based trajectories over a shortened duration to combat these issues. In the ALD multiple birth-cohorts are studied simultaneously in a longitudinal fashion with overlap in the age distributions between the cohorts. In this manner the same age span may be studied while reducing the number of measurements per participant, the study duration, and study costs. These designs also allow for the modeling of between-cohort differences, which are important for researchers interested in developing age-based trajectories that generalize to multiple cohorts. While models that incorporate cultural influence are increasingly relevant, there has not yet been widespread adoption of these designs. Part of the hesitancy to use ALDs stems from their unfamiliarity, as few methodological papers have demonstrated the efficacy of these designs for studying development. We propose the use of cost equations to utilize the cost-savings of the ALD to determine sample sizes that are of equal cost to a single-cohort design. The use of an equal cost sample size allows for ALDs to have N’s that are 10-85% larger than in the single-cohort design, thereby offsetting the potential loss of power in the ALD. We subsequently utilize Monte Carlo simulation methods to demonstrate how the statistical power and bias in the ALD is comparable to that of the single-cohort design for both linear and nonlinear models and discuss considerations for when between-cohort differences in development are present. Lastly, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY 1997) to demonstrate the ability of an ALD to capture both within-person and between-cohort variability in marijuana and tobacco use from the ages of 12 to 32. We additionally discuss considerations for the modeling of cohort membership and alternate strategies for cohort inclusion. Results from the simulations and in the NLSY suggest that ALDs should be the preferred longitudinal design for researchers studying age-related development.

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The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the interaction between various psychological, environmental, household and genetic factors and body mass index (BMI) growth during the youth's teens and twenties. The first essay examines the socio-economic factors that are correlated with BMI among NLSY97 respondents at two points in time, 1997 and 2010. The youth were 12 to 17 in the first survey year and 25-31 in the last. Covariates of importance in the final year were surprisingly similar to those in the first. Common socio-economic factors had only modest impacts on the respondent's BMI in either year. Consistent with other studies, maternal BMI had a strong, positive effect on adolescent BMI, but also on BMI of the respondents in their late twenties. The impact was systematically larger for biological mothers, which could suggest a genetic factor.

The second essay assesses the determinants of annual BMI growth rates over the entire 14 year period. The strong maternal BMI effect emerges in the annual growth rate estimates as well. The general results are robust to the use of individual and time fixed effects, though th the fixed effect approach does not permit estimation of maternal BMI (only available in 1997) on BMI growth. Growth rates decline with age, as one might expect, and more so at higher levels of initial BMI. Conversely BMI growth rates are less for respondents with initially higher BMI, a result that increases in absolute value as the respondent ages. The modest impacts of the usual socio-economic factors on BMI change between 1997 and 2010 noted in the first essay are confirmed in this annual growth rate data.

The last essay focuses on the decision-making process that underpins these BMI relationships. Weight control is considered as an expected utility maximization decision subject to the usual budget constraint in food and other goods. Of special interest is the impact of the youth's perception of his or her weight-to-height (BMI) status. In the first survey year, males and females appear to use different metrics for judging their height to weight proportionality. Males appear to judge themselves by standards, that are used for adults of the same BMI, females align themselves more closely with the CDC youth standard, which factors in expected growth in BMI until adulthood. Perhaps not surprisingly, males become heavier (higher BMI) by 2010. Misperceptions of weight category become systematic by 2010, with obese young (25-31) men and women reluctant to define themselves as "very overweight." This bias can be found in the 1997 data as well, but is less obvious because of the far fewer obese respondents in the first year. Misperceiving weight has deleterious consequences--those who underestimate increase weight faster and those who overestimate increase weight slower--compared to accurate perceivers.

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This dissertation examines factors that influence adult women in their decision to enroll and persist in college. Despite the fact that adult college enrollment represents a large and growing segment of higher education, especially for women, relatively few studies have examined the causes of this enrollment. The often interrupted educational and employment careers of women require event history analysis to sort out the influences of past and present on adult enrollment decisions. Two risk sets of women 25 and older were created using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79): women who started college at a traditional age but stopped out before receiving a degree and women who graduated high school but did not attend college. Four outcomes--return enrollment, full-time enrollment status, three-semester persistence, and degree completion--were analyzed using nested regression models. The first two blocks of fixed variables capture background and early college; the second two cover the family demands that compete for a woman's time as well as her job, which may be a source of motivation and financial resources. Cox regression is used to register each year's changes in marriage, children, and jobs against the event of enrollment. While parent's education is positively associated with adult return enrollment, their income has a contrary effect. The evidence suggests that lower parental income for (both risk sets) and early childbirth (for the high school graduates) predict enrollment because they are likely causes of non-enrollment at younger ages. Finally, having a full-time job, but one of shorter duration, predicts enrollment for both groups of women. The sharp differences between the two groups, however, argue for separating the two groups in future research. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=885696061&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3959&RQT=309&VName=PQD

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I make three contributions to family demographic research on the effects of incarceration on family processes. First, I revisit the question of the influence of incarceration on family formation and family stability using data that are better suited to the measurement of these events than the data used in previous research. Using life history calendar data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (1997-2009), a longitudinal study of 8,984 men and women in the United States, I establish the timing of incarcerations relative to the following family transitions: entry into cohabiting and marital unions and exit from cohabiting and marital unions. Second, I conduct the first prospective study of the consequences of incarceration for the timing of childbearing among adolescents and young adults. Third, I take into account the timing, frequency, and durations of incarcerations to better understand the relationship between incarceration and family processes.

Bibliography Citation

Jakubowski, Jessica. Incarceration and Family Transitions in Young Adulthood. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2013.

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This Dissertation includes two chapters focusing on understanding dynamic behavior in labor markets. Chapter One studies how workers choose occupations when they are required to learn about their occupation specific experience. Chapter Two discusses an estimation approach which combines structural estimation with reduced form approaches to deal with models when multiple forms of endogeneity are present in dynamic selection models.

Chapter One: The literature on occupational matching has traditionally assumed that an individual's match in one occupation is completely uncorrelated with their match in every other occupation in the economy. In this paper I develop and estimate a model that relaxes this assumption. The key feature of the model is that as an individual learns about their occupation specific ability in one occupation, this experience will be broadly informative about their ability in other occupations. Workers continually process their entire history of information which they use to determine when to change careers, as well as which new career to go to. Endogenizing information in this manner has been computationally prohibitive in the past. I extend new methods of solving dynamic discrete choice models with unobserved heterogeneity in a unique way that facilitates the estimation of an occupational choice model where individuals have correlated unobserved heterogenous ability in every occupation. The model is estimated on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. The results suggest that occupational ability shares a rich correlation structure. While the gains from search are large, a counterfactual shows that search frictions, including: risk aversion, destruction of occupation specific human capital, entry costs, and switching costs, limit worker's ability to find their comparative advantage.

Chapter Two: Economists typically take one of two approaches when estimating models containing omitted variables and measurement error: reduced form methods using instrumental variable, or structural methods that formally model the selection process of individuals. This paper demonstrates a new estimation strategy that conjoins these two methods in a useful way which takes advantage of each approaches individual strengths. The motivating example will focus on the literatures interpretation of the returns to education.

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I use data from the public and geocode files from both the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to examine the transition to adulthood and compare it across cohorts. These data are well suited for this dissertation because both contain a wide range of life course information, and respondents from each dataset have undergone the same developmental stages at different historical times (i.e. their 20s during 1980s and in the 2000s for the NLSY79 and 97 respectively).

This dissertation is separated into three independent studies; first, in chapter 2, I use Latent Class Analysis to investigate distinct patterns in the transition to adulthood for men and women. Results show that young adults in the NLSY97 are more disproportionately distributed to different classes, which indicates their diverse paths to adulthood compared to those of the NLSY79. In the following chapter, I examine the complexity of life course transitions by focusing on mobility and union formation. Findings reveal that life course events are closely related to each other but the relationship differs by cohort, pointing to contextual influence on young adults' life courses. As a decision on the life course is likely made in concert with other life events, chapter 4 examines endogeneity between life course transitions. I find that unobserved characteristics affect the estimation of life course events in both cohorts, and therefore ignoring the factors could misrepresent the actual relationship between life events. From these findings, I address implications of theory, methodology, and social policy for those in the transition to adulthood in chapter 5.

Bibliography Citation

Jang, Bohyun. A Cohort Comparison of the Transition to Adulthood in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Human Ecology, The Ohio State University, 2014.

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Purpose: Prolonged exposure to adverse socioeconomic conditions is associated with poor health. Research reports positive associations with time spent living below poverty and rates of cardiovascular disease. To date, the effect of these factors has been examined predominantly in the context of single medical conditions. This approach potentially masks relationships between long term socioeconomic disadvantage and development of complex medical presentations. Further, research that has examined cofactors of multiple chronic health conditions tends to use data from older populations. The current research addresses these gaps by examining patterns of accumulation of health conditions and their cofactors at two points during mid-life, when respondents are 40 and 50 years old.

Methods: I analyzed data from 5,196 participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Upon turning 40 and again when 50, respondents indicated whether they had ever been diagnosed with any of seven chronic health conditions. A latent transition analysis classified respondents based on these health conditions. Number of latent statuses was determined using Bayseian Information Criterion (BIC), other fit indices, and model interpretability. Respondent morbidity status became the dependent variable in a multinomial regression. Model predictors were indicators of life course socioeconomic conditions. They included measures of parental and respondent education, life course income, wealth at mid-life, home ownership, race and ethnicity, and other control variables with demonstrable associations to health, including smoking, alcohol, and body mass index.

Results: Fit indices identified 4-statuses, a small multi-morbid status predominantly associated with heart and lung conditions, two moderately sized statuses associated with arthritis and hypertension, respectively, and one large status whose members tended to report no chronic health conditions. Income, wealth, and education were significantly related to morbidity statuses at two time points Implications: These findings support a link between life course socioeconomic conditions and accrual of multiple medical conditions. Understanding the nature of these relationships is relevant for micro and macro-practice. Greater attunement to the link between health issues and economic and social adversity becomes critical to assessment and service coordination. Further, macro-practitioners could sharpen community level needs assessment and target macro-level interventions to achieve broader community health benefits.

Bibliography Citation

Jantz, Ian. Multimorbidity at Midilfe: An Analysis of Morbidity Patterns and Life Course Socioeconomic Cofactors. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2016.

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Objectives : (1) To determine accumulation of obesogenic behaviors during young adulthood by examining the relationship between excessive television viewing and inadequate fruit and vegetable intake. (2) To establish the co-occurrence of health-promoting behaviors by examining the relationship between adequate exercise and intake of fruit and vegetables.

Methods : The 1984 birth-cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 was followed at ages 18, 23, and 27 (N=1386). Multinomial logistic regression models, compensated for inflated type-I error (Î±=0.01) and adjusted for sex, race/ethnicity, education, income, marital status, and body mass index (BMI), examined behavioral associations. Additionally, 6244 respondents were followed at ages 18-22(Time-1), 23-27(Time-2), and 27-31(Time-3); repeated measures analysis of variance plus multiple regression determined if the transition of exercise frequency between Time-1 and Time-2 was associated with simultaneous and sequential changes in fruit/vegetable intake, controlling for sociodemographic factors and BMI.

Results : Males were more likely to exercise adequately and females to consume fruit/vegetable adequately; lowest rates were among blacks. In females and whites, heavy television viewing at age-18 was associated with inadequate vegetable consumption. In whites, excessive television viewing at age-27 accompanied very low vegetable intake. In females and blacks, excessive television viewing at age-27 co-occurred with inadequate fruit consumption. Moderately high television viewing in males at age-18 was associated with very low vegetable intake 5-years later. Moderately high television viewing in females at age-23 was associated with moderately low fruit intake 4-years later. Exercise frequency transition was linearly associated with concurrent fruit/vegetable intake. A small but significant effect of Time-2 exercise frequency on Time-3 fruit/vegetable intake existed, after accounting for bas
eline intakes.

Conclusion : Longitudinal associations reflected the probable effects of television advertisements on fruit/vegetable intake of high-school-age males and post-college-age females. Strong cross-sectional associations emphasized the probable role of mindless eating while watching television. Newly engaging and continuing with exercise behavior over considerable time may help form exercise habits and heuristics that facilitate improved fruit/vegetable consumption behavior. Therefore, a critical need exists for developing novel interventions to counteract food advertisements, converting mindless eating into mindlessly eating better and to facilitate transferring resources from healthy exercise behavior to healthier dietary behavior.

Bibliography Citation

Jayawardene, Wasantha P. Accumulation of Obesogenic and Health-promoting Behaviors in Young Adulthood: A Theory-driven Analysis of Associations and Sequences. Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, Indiana University, 2014.

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While previous theoretical analysis suggests that racial differences in death rates might play an important role in explaining the black-white education gap in the U.S., there is little empirical research to test this implication. This paper estimates the extent to which differences in expected mortality risks prior to entering college can explain differences in adult educational attainment in the 2000s, using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). This study finds that the impact of mortality is not as important as suggested by prior research. Specifically, of the total black-white education gap (roughly 1.12 schooling years), only about 0.05 years or less can be attributed to differences in mortality expectations. As this study confirms, the role of self-reported mortality expectations in explaining black-white education gap is small, and the impacts of death expectations from actual death rates on education are statistically insignificant for reference groups.

The second chapter examines whether individuals are likely to alter personal health-related behaviors once they increase their subjective longevity expectations. To determine if there is a relationship between health behaviors and longevity beliefs, I test one of implications of the Cutler-Glaeser (2009) smoking decision model, which suggests that nonsmokers whose expected survival probabilities have increased are unlikely to start smoking. This study uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is conducted every two years, from 1992 to 2010 (Waves 1-10). Specifically, the HRS data show that a certain share (2.13%) of nonsmokers at Wave t-1 whose subjective expected longevity beliefs increased across two waves did start smoking at Wave t. This small percentage is close to the fraction of new smokers who have steady or decreased survival beliefs (1.99% and 2.19%, respectively). This finding also holds true for other behaviors including heavy drinking, obesity, and physical inactivity. Thus, the findings I present based on the HRS data contrasts with the Cutler-Glaeser model.

Using scores from the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), Herrnstein and Murray (1994) reported that intelligence can be a powerful predictor of a range of outcomes related to social behaviors (e.g., incarceration, marriage, out-of-wedlock birth, low birth weight and poverty). In contrast, a recent study found that measured intelligence using the same AFQT scores played a considerably smaller role on an important socioeconomic indicator, namely, hourly wages as measured from 2000 to 2010. My third paper attempts to replicate the Herrnstein and Murray study using a different data set, the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to look into several behaviorally-related social outcomes. The main finding is that, in general, the role of AFQT scores in predicting social behaviors has not substantially changed over the last 20 years. I provide a few possible explanations for this finding.

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Essay two considers the effect of voluntary job mobility on worker well-being. Using data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 (NLSY79), I construct measures of worker well-being that take into account various ingredients likely to factor into a worker's utility at workplace. I adopt a difference-in-differences matching strategy to uncover the otherwise unobservable potential outcomes of not changing jobs and identify the effect of voluntary labor mobility on worker well-being. The result shows that voluntary turnover increases the well-being at workplace for movers who are in the early stage of their career and conduct complex job changes involving different types of job. However, the positive effect of job mobility is insignificant and much smaller for movers taking simple job changes. This is in contrast with the fact that complex job movers actually experienced insignificant wage gains from the mobility. This result highlights the role of non-pecuniary job rewards in triggering voluntary turnover.

Bibliography Citation

Jiang, Yan. Essays on Labor Market Matching, Labor Mobility and Educational Mismatch. Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 2012.

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In Chapter 3, using the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we find mothers earn less on average even after controlling for other wage determinants. The wage penalty associated with motherhood is insignificant in the early career, and arises partly due to mothers accumulating less work experience. As a result, late mothers experience stronger (weaker) returns to work experience before (after) their transition to motherhood. The differentials in returns to work experience are robust to controlling for occupational skill requirements and time spent out of employment.

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Recent research suggests that the female advantage in educational attainment is driven in part by the differential effect of family background characteristics on the noncognitive skills of males relative to females. Building on this research, this study provides new evidence that links family characteristics and gender differences in noncognitive ability and school performance. Data are drawn from the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult Surveys. Multilevel modeling is used to examine how family context relates to gender differences in adolescent externalizing behavior, and how family context relates to gender differences in externalizing behavior and high school grades. Results indicate a strong relationship between externalizing behavior and grades that is not explained by the female advantage in grades. Results also indicate that males are differentially affected by family context and suggest that the pathways through which family structure, noncognitive ability, and school performance operate are different for boys relative to girls. A primary conclusion is that boys' externalizing behavior is more dependent upon family background characteristics. Findings suggest the need to address both the school and family environments by formulating policies that promote the development of noncognitive skills in school as well as those that remedy family disadvantage in the home.

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Research focused on the factors that contribute to the practice of health promoting behaviors by racial and ethnic minority adolescents has been limited and inconclusive. The purpose of this study was to identify a subset of factors, including demographic, social, and environmental factors that are highly correlated with differences in the eating habits and exercise patterns of racial and ethnic minority adolescents. The study is of public health significance as the results may be used to improve the methods and strategies currently in practice to reduce and eliminate the disparities in health for racial and ethnic minorities.

The sample was drawn from the final sample size for the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort, which numbered 8,984. The study tested the hypothesis that differences in health-promoting behaviors among racial and ethnic minority groups are related to differences in the associations between the influential factors and the health-promoting behavior by racial and ethnic minority group. Body Mass Index was used to measure adolescent health promoting behaviors such as diet and exercise. Multiple imputation and univariate forward stepwise multiple regression analyses found that associations between demographic, social, and environmental factors and the eating habits and exercise patterns of minority adolescents varied by racial and ethnic minority subpopulation.

Study results suggest that policies, programs, and research intent on reducing and/or eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities must capture, analyze, and evaluate information at the racial and ethnic subpopulation level to capture differences between subpopulations. A small sample size due to the removal of non-respondents, the exclusion of health promoting behavior variables from the study due to high non-response rates, and the exclusion of some racial and ethnic subpopulations due to inadequate numbers all served as limitations of the study. Future resear
ch should further study the differential impact of the various factors included in the present study, as well as those not examined here, on the dietary and exercise habits of several racial and ethnic adolescent subpopulations and use the findings to inform research, policy and program efforts to reduce and eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities.

Bibliography Citation

Johnson, Wilfred Eleazor Ii. Which Demographic, Social, and Environmental Factors Are Associated with the Eating Habits and Exercise Patterns of Racial and Ethnic Minority Adolescents. Ph.D. Dissertation, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, 2010.

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With increasing numbers of women baby boomer retirees in the U.S., the issue of lack of financial security after retirement due to limited resources has begun to draw attention in policy and research areas. However, few studies have focused on the predictors of financial retirement planning. The purpose of this study includes the following: (1) to examine relations between demographic characteristics and attitudes toward retirement and financial retirement planning of baby boomer women, and (2) to examine the longitudinal trajectories of financial retirement planning of baby boomer women, and to identify the roles of demographic characteristics and attitudes toward retirement in predicting those trajectories. It was hypothesized that the rates of financial retirement planning increase over time, but the rates of financial retirement planning vary across individuals and time. Specifically, it was hypothesized that demographic variables and attitudes toward retirement relate to the rates of financial retirement planning across time. This study utilized data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women...Among 22 waves of the data set, four recent surveys (1995, 1997, 1999, and 2001) were utilized for the current study. Sample sizes of cross-sectional analysis and longitudinal analysis were 2,146 and 1,250, respectively. The mean age was 45.32 ( SD = 2.23, range = 42-49) at the first time. The results demonstrated that race/ethnicity, educational attainment, marital status, and annual income of baby boomer women were significantly related to their financial retirement planning. Also, positive attitudes toward retirement were associated with higher rates of financial retirement planning. Moreover, longitudinal analyses demonstrated that individual changes in marital status and in income level significantly related to financial retirement planning over time.

Bibliography Citation

Jung, Eunju. Longitudinal Trajectories of Financial Retirement Planning of Baby Boomer Women: The Role of Demographic Characteristics and Attitudes toward Retirement. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies, University of Nebraska, June 2011.

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This dissertation uses the first 14 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to examine the relationship between educational attainment and arrest. Regressions were run to assess the effect of educational attainment on arrest for the Forgotten Half, as well as by gender and racial and ethnic group. Results from these zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regressions confirm a relationship, with dropouts being arrested the most, high school graduates the least, and stopouts falling in the middle. Results for both childhood social control theory and identity theory models found that inclusion of concepts from these theories weakened the relationship between stopping out and arrest so much that the relationship became insignificant. Dropping out, on the other hand, was only slightly affected by the addition of these theoretical constructs. The relationship between dropping out and arrest was diminished more by the inclusion of theoretical variables measured during adulthood. The dissertation also considers the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

Bibliography Citation

Kamerdze, Amy. Exploring the Relationship Between Educational Attainment and Arrest within the Forgotten Half. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park, 2017.

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The three papers comprising this dissertation examine issues surrounding the formation of women's families and careers. The first paper focuses on family size, and utilizes data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to investigate whether women who have fewer or more children than they initially wanted are at increased risk for depression at mid-life. Results of multiple regression analysis indicate that the relationship between depression and missed fertility targets depends on race and education. Particularly, having more children than initially wanted is related to increased depression at age 40 for black women with less than a high school education. Conversely, having fewer children than initially wanted increases the depression risk for black college educated women at age 40. Most notably, among black and white women who are childless but initially wanted children, only women with less than a college education have an increased risk of depression at mid-life.

The second paper centers on fertility timing and draws on qualitative interview data with 33 highly educated women living in the San Francisco bay area. Findings from this study reveal that delayed childbearing is related to reduced employment postnatally.

Particularly, when women who delay childbearing ultimately become mothers, they are more likely to perceive that they have achieved their career goals, utilized their educations, and made a difference in their fields, which allows them to "feel good" about entering a separate, family-focused phase of their lives, while scaling back or exiting the labor force. This is in stark contrast to women who become mothers earlier, and who feel they still have much to accomplish in their careers.

The third paper uses the same qualitative data to investigate women's career choices. Economic arguments assume that young women have well developed visions of their future family life and how they will combine work and family when they
make educational and career decisions. This study demonstrates that this is not usually the case. Young women generally give work-family considerations little thought, assuming they can do it all, and they often ended up with work and family lives that are quite different than they anticipated.

Bibliography Citation

Kangas, Nicole. Forming Families and Careers: The Effects of Family Size, First Birth Timing, and Early Family Aspirations on U.S. Women's Mental Health, Labor Force Participation, and Career Choices. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, August 2011.

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This dissertation concerns the formation and the consequences of people's beliefs and preferences. Empirically and experimentally, I focus on individuals' beliefs and ideologies through mechanisms such as group dynamics, education, and educational content.

Chapter 3 estimates the causal effect of education on religiosity in the United States using NLSY97. Fixed effects and instrumental variable method are used as identification strategies. Although cross-sectional ordinary least squares estimation shows a positive correlation between religious outcomes and educational attainment, both fixed effect models and IV estimation show statistically significant negative effects of education, even when cognitive test score is controlled. This suggests that conventional OLS omits factors that push both education and religiosity.

Bibliography Citation

Kao, Han-Yen. Experimental and Empirical Studies of Belief Formation. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 2017.

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This dissertation consists of three separate chapters on topics in labor economics.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (NLSY-97)
the first chapter, entitled “Ignorance and Bliss: Early Onset Depression, Human
Capital Accumulation and Labor Market Outcomes in Early Adulthood,” establishes
a link between early onset mood disorders and post-secondary education, labor
market outcomes, marriage, criminal activity and substance abuse. In addition,
controlling for contemporaneous depression symptoms provides insight into the
mechanisms by which adolescent depression affects long-term outcomes. The results
of this analysis indicate that the negative long-term outcomes associated with early
onset depression symptoms are significant, and result from both the initial depressive
episode as well as recurrent symptoms experienced later in life.

The second chapter, entitled “Student Responses to Changes in the Cost of Pos-
Secondary Education,” focuses primarily on the effect of changes in tuition and
financial aid on the education and labor market choices of post-secondary students.
The existing literature dealing with the cost of education focuses primarily on
education outcomes. Given the large proportion of students who work while in
school, this focus provides an incomplete picture of how students adapt to changes in
the cost of education. In this chapter, I develop a theoretical model to illustrate
tradeoffs between formal human capital accumulation and labor market participation,
which yields predictions about how college cost affects student employment
decisions. My empirical analysis is problematic for several reasons, and I do not find
evidence to support the predictions of my theoretical model. Despite the lack of
empirical evidence, the theoretical model presented here may be a useful starting
point for future researchers.

The third chapter, entitled “The Impact of Divorce Law Changes on Fertility
Decisions,” examines the relationship between fertility and unilateral and no-fault
divorce laws. The results provide evidence that unilateral divorce laws may have
decreased birthrates. Further, we analyze the effect unilateral and no-fault divorce
laws have on the birth rate among women with different demographic characteristics
such as age, marital status, and level of education. We find that unilateral divorce
laws result in a decrease in birthrates among married women. Additionally, there are
differing effects of no-fault divorce laws across age groups, with a significant positive
effect on women aged 15 to 29. In contrast, it appears that unilateral divorce laws
decrease fertility rates of women across all age groups and across all levels of
education.

Bibliography Citation

Kaplan, Erin. Three Essays on Labor Economics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California at Santa Barbara, December 2011.

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The second chapter presents results of an evaluation of the General Educational Development (GED) program. The GED is an achievement test that high school dropouts can take to certify that they are equivalent to high school graduates. It reviews the existing evidence on the returns to GED certificates and presents new evidence. After controlling for achievement test scores before high school, GED recipients fare no better than other high school dropouts but lag behind high school graduates, because GED recipients lack non-cognitive skills that are missed by achievement tests.

Bibliography Citation

Kautz, Timothy Danna. Essays in the Economics of Education and Skill Development. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Chicago, 2015.

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This dissertation examines the effects of career interruptions on workers' wages. In chapter four I examine whether controlling for the type of interruption differently affects men's and women's wages and therefore can be used to explain the remaining gender wage differences. The increased participation of married women in the labor force has increased their wages from just 30% of men's wages in 1890 to nearly 80% as of 2001. Thus, although the gender wage gap has narrowed over time, it has yet to be eliminated. One argument for the persistence of the gender wage gap is that previously researchers have used poor measures of experience to estimate men's and women's wages. Although previous studies have made strides in measuring experience, including controls for the timing of work experience, the gender wage gap persists. I extend the wage-gap literature by including controls for the types of interruptions men and women encounter. Because they typically experience different types of interruptions, I examine whether the varying types affect wages differently. I control for the types of interruptions and find similar effects for men's and women's wages. My study shows that types of job interruptions do not explain the remaining wage differentials. The fifth chapter extends from the fourth chapter by including controls for all periods of unpaid leave from work. I examine whether wage differences exist between workers who return to their current employer post-interruption versus those who change employers post-interruption. I find differences in the wage effects from different types of unpaid leave for men and women. Chapter six extends from previous chapters by including controls for all periods of paid leave from work in addition to unpaid leaves from work. I examine whether depreciation effects occur when women spend time out of work but receive compensation through paid maternity leaves. I find no evidence that time out of work because of paid maternity leaves deprec
iates skills.

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In the second chapter, I consider identification of treatment effects when the treatment is endogenous. The use of instrumental variables is a popular solution to deal with endogeneity, but this may give misleading answers when the instrument is invalid. I show that when the instrument is invalid due to correlation with the first stage unobserved heterogeneity, a second (also possibly invalid) instrument allows to partially identify not only the local average treatment effect, but also the entire potential outcomes distributions for compliers. I exploit the fact that the distribution of the observed outcome in each group defined by the treatment and the instrument is a mixture of the distributions of interest. I write the identified set in the form of conditional moment inequalities, and provide an easily implementable inference procedure. Under some (testable) tail restrictions, the potential outcomes distributions are point-identified for compliers. Finally, I illustrate my methodology on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men to estimate returns to college using college proximity as (potential) instrument. I find that a 95% level confidence set for the average return to college for compliers is [38%, 79%].

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The current dissertation investigated the role of personality in occupational gravitation. Two directions of occupational gravitation were proposed and tested--lateral and vertical gravitation. Results revealed that individuals found improved person-occupation personality fit over time as measured by the indices of Openness, Conscientiousness, Openness-Conscientiousness, and Big Five fit. Effect sizes ranged from .12 SD to .38 SD. Findings also indicated that Extraversion and Agreeableness fit worsened over time, and Emotional Stability fit remained constant. Analyses further showed that improved fit over time was driven by vertical and not lateral gravitation. Extraversion (+), Openness (-), Agreeableness (-), and Conscientiousness (+) predicted upward job zone movement, and this job zone movement resulted in improved fit. That is, job zone mediated the relationship between age and person-occupation personality fit.

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The first paper demonstrates the important role of job displacement in the household bankruptcy decision. Consistent with predicted filing behavior under persistent income shocks, I find that households in the NLSY are four times more likely to file in the year following job loss, with a smaller but significant response persisting two to three years. Aggregate patterns are also consistent with the model: At the county level, 1000 job losses are associated with 8-11 bankruptcies, the effects also last two to three years, and manufacturing job loss is more likely to induce bankruptcy than non-manufacturing job loss. The results suggest that providing credit counseling to vulnerable households at the time of displacement may be more effective than providing it at the time of bankruptcy.

Bibliography Citation

Keys, Benjamin J. Three Essays on Labor and Credit Markets. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Michigan, 2009.

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This dissertation investigates the link between different aspects of labor market and individuals' health. The first chapter analyzes the relationship between the use of four different substances and nonstandard work schedules. Using the NLSY97 and applying standard panel techniques as well as survival analyses, I find that contrary to most previous evidence, nonstandard work schedule is not necessarily associated with an increase in substance use, and in the case of drinking and binge drinking such correlation is actually negative. Evidence also suggests that drug prone individuals tend to work more at nonstandard schedules. Results are robust to the specification at the intensive margin and accounting for long-term exposure to work at nonstandard schedules. The second chapter investigates the effect of alcohol use on job search behavior of young individuals. Using the age of respondents from the NLSY97 both in the year and month formats and applying regression discontinuity design by utilizing the surge in alcohol consumption at age 21, I find that young adults tend to increase their drinking and binge drinking once they are allowed to legally access alcohol. However, I find that the surge in alcohol use at age 21 does not seem to immediately or directly affect the job search behavior of young individuals while they are employed or unemployed. I also find that it does not seem to affect their lack of desire for work. The third chapter investigates the effects of workers' age, gender, and race relative to those of their supervisors on several measures of the employees' mental wellbeing. Evidence suggests that men show positive mental health signs when they have supervisors of same gender and race. They also seem to like supervisors who are almost the same age. On the contrary, women's mental health seems to be negatively affected when they have female supervisors. When the gender match effect is combined with race, it is magnified. Women also report negative mental health signs when all these demographic characteristic matches are happening at the same time. Additional tests suggest that reverse causality does not seem to be a major issue here.

Bibliography Citation

Khadem Sameni, Mona. Essays on Health and Labor Market Practices in the U.S. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 2016.

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The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between multiple characteristics of maternal employment, parenting practices, and adolescents' transition outcomes to young adulthood. The research addressed four main research questions. First, are the characteristics of maternal work (i.e., hours worked, multiple jobs held, work schedules, earnings, and occupation) related to adolescents' enrollment in post-secondary education, employment, or involvement in neither of these types of activities as young adults? Second, are the work characteristics related to parental involvement and monitoring, and are the parenting practices related to adolescents' transition outcomes? Third, do parental involvement and monitoring mediate any relationships between the characteristics of maternal employment and adolescents' transition outcomes? Finally, do any associations between characteristics of maternal employment and parenting practices and adolescents' transition outcomes vary by poverty status, race/ethnicity, or gender?

To address these research questions, secondary data analysis was conducted, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) from 1998 through 2004. The study sample consisted of 849 youths who were 15 through 17 years of age in either 1998 or 2000, and were 19 through 21 years of age when their transition outcomes in young adulthood were measured four years later. Multinomial logistic and ordinary least squares regression models were estimated to answer the research questions.

Study findings indicated that of the maternal work characteristics, mothers' multiple jobs held, occupation, and work schedule were significantly related to the youths' transition outcomes. When mothers held multiple jobs for 1 to 25 weeks per year, and when mothers held jobs involving lower levels of occupational complexity, their youths were more likely to experience employment rather than post-secondary education. Adolescents whose mothers
worked a standard work schedule were less likely to experience other types of transitions than post-secondary education.

With regard to the effects of maternal employment on parenting practices, none of the maternal work variables were related to parental involvement, and only one variable, mothers working less than 40 hours per week, was negatively related to parental monitoring. In addition, when parents were more involved with their youths' education, the youths were less likely to transition into employment and other types of transitions rather than post-secondary education. The parenting practices did not mediate the relation between the significant work variables (holding multiple jobs, work schedule, and occupation) and youths' transition outcomes. Finally, none of the interactions between maternal work characteristics and poverty status, race/ethnicity, and gender met the criteria for determining significance; but in a series of sub-group analyses, some differences according to poverty status and gender were found. Despite the lack of mediation and moderation, the findings of this study have important implications for social policy and social work intervention. Based on the findings, suggestions are made in these areas to improve working mothers' lives and their adolescents' development and successful transition to adulthood. Finally, directions for future research are discussed.

Bibliography Citation

Kim, Heuijin. The Effect of Maternal Employment on Adolescents' Transition to Young Adulthood. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010..

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The research literature on adolescent development has discussed adolescent dating in relation to behavioral changes. However, very little discussion has been devoted to theoretical explanations of the intricacies involved in the relationship between the adolescent dating experience and the development of delinquent behavior. Consequently, there seems to be a lack of understanding as to how dating activities in adolescence influence delinquency, aside from a general consensus that adolescent dating tends to be related to deviant behavior.

This dissertation, therefore, aims to add to the current knowledge about the development of adolescent behavior by examining the impact of dating on delinquency from different theoretical perspectives. In particular, I draw upon the social learning and social control perspectives to explore the theoretical influence of dating behavior. While dating can be seen from these perspectives as a criminogenic factor, it may well become normative behavior at later ages and may provide a positive influence on one's behavior by offering intimacy. The relationship between adolescent dating and delinquency can be more complicated when it is viewed from developmental perspectives because of the potential impact of maturation. Consequently, this study will focus on the following empirical questions. Does the influence of adolescent dating on delinquent behavior operate through social learning and control factors? Does the stability of dating relationships matter? Is the impact of dating age-sensitive?

This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to investigate these research questions. Logistic regression and fixed-effects modeling are used to test proposed hypotheses.

Bibliography Citation

Kim, Ryang Hui. Adolescent Dating Experience and Delinquency. Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, State University of New York, 2011.

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Chapter 1 presents new evidence on whether foreign-born workers assimilate, which we define as the degree to which the wages of foreign-born workers approach those of comparable native-born workers with additional time spent in the United States. While the existing literature relies on cross-section data, we use longitudinal data on native-born and foreign-born populations which allows us to control for fixed unobserved heterogeneity. Longitudinal analysis of immigration, however, may suffer from bias from sample attrition and outmigration to the extent that they are related to wages and wage growth. We draw on recent work by Hirano, Imbens, Ridder, and Rubin (2001) to develop an estimation strategy for use with overlapping rotating panel data which accounts for both sample attrition and outmigration. We provide identification conditions and an estimation procedure for the weighting function when both sample attrition and outmigration are present. We apply the methods using the matched Current Population Survey (CPS) for 1994 to 2004. Overall, we find little evidence that foreign-born workers assimilate. We also find that older migrants are more skilled than younger ones conditional on the year of entry. Our results suggest that analyses of immigrant wage growth based on repeated cross-section studies may be biased upward by individual heterogeneity. Controlling for this heterogeneity reverses the conventional result of economic assimilation.

Chapter 2 contributes to the literature on earnings dynamics. We incorporate uncertainty about future rental rates for human capital into an optimal life-cycle human capital investment model. We show that optimal life-cycle investment behavior implies not only individual heterogeneity in earnings slopes but also the presence of a persistent error process in earnings. Persistent errors are induced by the response of individuals in human capital investments to transitory shocks to the rental rate of human capital. We specify an econometric model of earnings dynamics that is loosely consistent with the solution to the worker's optimal investment decision and estimate the model using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). We confirm that heterogeneity in earnings slopes, permanent errors, and transitory shocks all play a significant role in earnings dynamics.

Chapter 3 uses new econometric methods to examine the large gap in wealth between whites and African-Americans. Methodologically, we close the gap between econometric theory and practice by applying the methods of Altonji and Matzkin (2005). We explore ways of implementing their LAR and SFD estimators when the number of control variables is large, as is common in real world applications. A number of studies have found that the effect of permanent non-asset income on wealth is smaller for blacks than whites. A partial explanation is that, as a result of past discrimination, the earnings of whites may be more strongly related to unobserved parental variables than the earnings of blacks. Altonji and Doraszelski (2005) investigate this possibility using regression models with sibling fixed effects to control for unobserved background variables. However, as they point out, their estimation strategy requires that the unobserved characteristics enter additively, which is unlikely. Consequently, we apply the LAR estimator. In addition, we use the SFD estimator to examine the role of differences in the wealth function and differences in the distribution of unobservables as the sources black-white differences in the link between wealth and earnings. Our results largely confirm the findings of AD and others that wealth is more sensitive to permanent earnings and to self employment status for whites than for blacks.

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The first purpose of this study was to identify different attendance patterns and trajectories from the college-going young adult period onwards as a whole while still maintaining and emphasizing the individualized nature of the trajectory itself. Although social backgrounds affect comparatively different college experiences, few if any studies exist that explore how social background relates differently within the college-going population. Thus the study's second purpose was to explore how social background affects different higher education enrollment trajectories. The study used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to test the research questions. The outcome variable was credits earned, which reflected the cumulative percentage of credits earned toward a BA degree by a respondent in a given year. The outcome variable was rearranged by both age and high school graduation year. This study applied growth mixture modeling (GMM) to explore the variability in the data concerning credits earned. In this way, discrete growth trajectories (classes) were identified, and predictors of membership in those classes were gauged. As a result of GMM analysis, the findings indicate that a quadratic 4-class model based on the high school graduation timing variable, which included traditional and non-traditional trajectories of credits earned, best explained variations in enrollment patterns in higher education in the present sample. This study also investigated whether the credits-earned trajectories within higher education could be differentiated in terms of academic, social, cultural, or economic background factors. The results support the contention that historically disadvantaged students are likely to follow nontraditional college enrollment patterns compared to their advantaged counterparts. Therefore, while existing research has focused on the significant influence of academic, social, cultural, and economic background, this study provides evidence that students follow notably different credits-earned patterns once they have entered the higher education system.

Bibliography Citation

Kim, Won Ho. The Enrollment Patterns of Higher Education: Do Social Backgrounds Really Matter? Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2016.

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The thesis studies the effects of taxation and Unemployment Insurance program on the labor market search and employment dynamics of high school graduates in the U.S. We develop a dynamic life-cycle model of job search with institutional features of taxes and UI benefits, and examine the interaction between them to derive the effects on the optimization problem of single agents; labor force participation decisions, consumption, asset accumulation, labor status transitions, welfare, and the reservation wage. Knowing the effect of taxation and unemployment benefit is twofold and theoretically ambiguous, we estimate the model using a sub-sample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 with NLSY Geocode variables, and fit the model to the data by the Simulated Method of Moments. Given the SMM estimates, we conduct several policy experiments involving changes in the benefit rates, maximum duration that the benefits can be paid, deduction amounts, and income tax rates. We find that the disincentive to work dominates the incentive effect under the current Unemployment Insurance and taxation policies. The maximum benefit-paying period extension and increase in the UI replacement rate raise search and unemployment duration, but decrease wage earnings, assets, consumption, and sacrifice individuals' Wealth in turn. Increase in tax rates raises the unemployment duration and the first accepted wages, but lowers reemployment rate, wage earnings, assets, and consumption. Allowing tax exemption at the lowest tax brackets lowers the first unemployment duration, average search duration, and first accepted wage, but raises individual wealth. The income tax effects proposed by our policy experiments more stands out in high income tax area due to the higher unemployment rate.

Bibliography Citation

Kim, Yoo Bin. A Structural Model of Taxation and Unemployment Insurance on Search Dynamics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2014.

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Given current rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing nonresident paternal parenting is becoming increasingly common. Recent public sentiment has increasingly called for the involvement of these fathers in their children's lives under the assumption that such involvement will have positive benefits for children. Yet there is only limited evidence for this assumption. Previous studies of the effects of father involvement for children offer contradictory findings. This dissertation extends knowledge of the consequences of paternal involvement for child well-being. Using data from the child supplement to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) it tests through a series of multivariate regression models whether father visitation or the payment of child support is significantly associated with several measures of child well-being. A second related objective of this dissertation is to specify the conditions that promote the importance of nonresident father involvement for child well-being. The results indicate that overall there is only limited evidence to support the hypothesis that nonresident father involvement has positive benefits for children. The strongest evidence is for the effect of child support in the domain of academic achievement.

Bibliography Citation

King, Valarie. Consequences of Outside Father Involvement for Children's Well-Being. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1993.

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This study utilizes multiple waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) to examine Hagan's original Power-Control Theory (1985) employing structural equation modeling. The research sought to examine gender differences in offending, as well as other concepts contained within Power-Control Theory, such as parenting. Results of the study showed mixed support for the theory. Power-Control Theory does produce convincing evidence of the importance of maternal control, particularly for daughters. Key findings also included gender differences in patriarchal attitudes as well as risk preferences. These findings suggest the role of females in changing, although it may not be becoming similar to the role of males. Policy implications include the importance of parenting programs to decrease delinquency and later criminal activity. More programs such incorporate gender differences in the impact of parenting, particularly by mothers. The study concludes with further discussion of the implications of this research and the policy implications.

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An extensive body of literature documents a relationship between formal education and health that is strong, broad, and persistent. When presented with such a robust association, it is natural to make the leap, implicitly if not explicitly, to a presumption of causality. However, some have questioned the causal link on both conceptual and empirical grounds, arguing that the apparent relationship between education and health might in fact be due in some part to third factors common to both educational attainment and health, but generally omitted from empirical models. The omitted-variables problem is exacerbated by the nature of most health-specific surveys. Such surveys, while rich in health data, generally provide sparse information about respondents' socioeconomic circumstances in youth, when educational intentions and possible determinants of adult health behaviors are formed.

This paper uses a relatively data-rich longitudinal dataset (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979) and instrumental variables (IV) methods to investigate the nature of the observed relationship between educational attainment and health behaviors and health status in midlife. I first estimate the effect of youth health on subsequent educational attainment. I then estimate a series of models of health behaviors and outcomes, and compare the estimated effects of education on health when other key variables are omitted and then included. I then estimate IV models for each dependent variable, using college proximity, area unemployment rates at the time of schooling, and availability of household reading materials in youth as instruments for educational attainment.

The models of educational attainment that include youth health indicate that health limitations in youth has a negative effect on educational attainment, reducing education by about one-half year on average. Comparison of richer with more parsimonious models of health suggest that estimated education effects are
significant and robust to specification, but generally modest in effect size. Tests of endogeneity indicate that education is endogenous in models of active/nonactive and recent check-up, and exogenous in all other models. These test results combined with the fact that the IV results were generally larger in magnitude than the single equation results give us some confidence that single equation estimates of the effect of education are consistent, and may even be conservative.

Bibliography Citation

Kirk, Adele Marie. The Relationship Between Education and Health: Is It Causal? Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Los Angeles, 2007. DAI-A 68/11, May 2008.

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Chapter 2 studies a puzzle in the literature on employer learning and wage setting. It has been argued that employers are poorly informed about the cognitive skills of their workers, so that the most skilled workers have a strong incentive to reveal information to reap higher wages. The puzzle is why cognitive testing isn't in greater use. My coauthor Maria Zumbuehl and I show that entry-level employers already have access to highly predictive, publicly observed proxies of the relevant cognitive skills, making testing redundant.

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In the second chapter, I estimate the intergenerational transmission of education in the United States between 1980 and 2013. I find that intergenerational persistence in education has increased substantially among blacks in recent years while remaining stable among whites and Hispanics. I observe this trend when using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics as well as the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. I demonstrate that much of the increase in educational persistence among blacks is due to decreases in upward mobility. The increase in black educational persistence is found in both two-parent and single-parent households, and I do not find similar trends and differences when estimating intergenerational income persistence.

Bibliography Citation

Koppera, Vedant. The Female College Boom, Educational Mobility, and Overeducation in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2016.

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Empirical studies in the job displacement literature have found that workers face significant earnings losses on average, when they are permanently displaced from jobs. Previous empirical evidence suggests that the costliness of job loss varies widely. Gibbons and Katz (1991) develop and test a model in which layoffs provide the market with information concerning the quality of laid-off workers. Layoffs provide a signal of worker productivity to potential employers, since firms layoff their lowest productivity workers first. In this essay, I construct a framework in which labor market conditions influence the stigma of layoffs. Later, I explicitly allow firms to calculate the probability of job loss for each worker, and also examine the impact of multiple job losses. This second approach models firms as using all available worker and job-specific attributes to interpret the information provided by a layoff.

In the first part of this essay, I summarize the job displacement literature and provide a theoretical motivation that allows for labor market conditions to affect the signal associated with job loss. The theoretical model predicts that a weaker signal is provided regarding worker quality when many layoffs occur.

Next, the essay contains several tests that examine whether the conditions surrounding a job loss affect post-displacement wages. I first utilize the Displaced Worker Survey and estimate that layoffs have larger post-displacement wage costs for male workers, as compared to plant closings. I also find that male, white-collar workers would face lower costs associated with displacement if the local unemployment rate were to increase, suggesting that the informative value of layoffs depends upon the market conditions under which the layoff occurs. As an additional empirical test, I investigate the stigma effect of layoffs using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth using two different approaches. The second approach explicitly m
odels the market's interpretation of the conditions surrounding a layoff, and allows for the examination of multiple job. My results provide evidence that labor market conditions affect the stigma associated with layoffs for a sample of male workers, using both approaches. I conclude the essay with a discussion of policy implications.

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This dissertation proposes a graphical analysis and presentation system for fitting, evaluating, and reporting longitudinal models in social sciences. The graphical innovations demonstrated here address practical issues that arise in evaluating sequences of statistical models. A progression of nested or otherwise related models in a sequence creates a context for model comparisons. The proposed graphical methods provide the researcher with visualization tools to facilitate model evaluation, using data mapping and interactive document design. The study applies these methods to examine empirical trends of religious involvement using a nationally representative household sample of American youth, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 (NLSY97). Annual measures in the NLSY97 from 2000 to 2011 provided panel data on church attendance from approximately 9,000 individuals born between 1980 and 1984. These data are examined using latent curve models (LCM) to study the nature of change in religious involvement between ages 13 and 31. Data, code, and reproducibility instructions for this study are published as a GitHub repository and are available to the research community.

Mother-Daughter Relationship During Early Adolescence and its Influence on Sexual Initiation Prior to age 16 in the Daughter
Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, Graduate Program in Nursing, 2009
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Adolescent Sexual Activity; Age at First Intercourse; Child Self-Administered Supplement (CSAS); Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mothers and Daughters; Parent Supervision/Monitoring; Parent-Child Relationship/Closeness; Parental Influences

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Background: Delaying early sexual initiation among adolescents remains a major public health priority as approximately 745,000 pregnancies occur to adolescent females each year in the United States, the highest among any developed nation (Ventura, Abma, Mosher & Henshaw, 2008). In addition, the acquisition of a sexually transmitted infection disproportionately affects this population (CDC, 2009). Sexual initiation before age 16 has been linked to negative sexual health sequelae (Abma, Martinez, Mosher & Dawson, 2004; Holcombe, Carrier, Manlove & Ryan, 2008; MacKay, 2007). Child developmental theory identifies early adolescence (10-14 years) as a critical transition period. Girls have been found to have lower levels of self-identity formation, and more amenable to parental influence during this time period (Allison & Schultz, 2001). The mother-daughter dyadic relationship is a powerful force within the family (Dickerson & Crase, 2005) and compared to fathers, mothers are often the parent primarily responsible for care giving, nurturance (Santrock, 2007) and monitoring (DiClemente et al., 2001). Specific variables within the mother-daughter relationship were examined. Three core dimensions (cohesion, flexibility, and communication) from the circumplex model of family systems (Olson, Russell & Sprenkle, 1983; Olson & Gorall, 2006) were used as well as two others (parental monitoring and satisfaction with time spent together) identified from the literature (Borawski, Ievers-Landis, Lovegreen & Trapl, 2003; Crosnoe & Trinitapoli, 2008). Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the association of cohesion, flexibility, communication, monitoring and satisfaction of time spent together (as perceived by the daughter) with sexual initiation by age 16 years. A sample of 1592 adolescent females and their mothers was used for this analysis.

Methods: The sample was drawn from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Child and Young Adult surveys (NLSY79).
The dependent measure was the females' self reported age at sexual initiation. Mother-daughter relationship variables examined were: cohesion, flexibility, communication, monitoring and satisfaction of time spent together during early adolescence. Sociodemographic characteristics of: race/ethnicity, family structure, age of mother at her daughter's birth, mother's education, and net family income were also included in the analysis.

Results: Girls who reported being satisfied with the amount of time spent together, high levels of cohesion, and good communication with their mother were less likely to report sexual initiation by age 16. Girls who came from homes with higher family incomes, whose mothers had a high school diploma or higher, and who were born to mothers who were not teen mothers themselves were also less likely to report sexual initiation before age 16. In addition, the mother-daughter relationship was also associated with reduced report of sexual initiation by age 16 for those with 3 or more positive dimensions within the relationship.

Conclusions: Results support that high levels of cohesion, good communication and being satisfied with the time spent together in the mother-daughter relationship during early adolescence is associated with later sexual initiation in the daughter. This suggests that this relationship may act as a protective factor against sexual initiation prior age 16.

Bibliography Citation

Kovar, Cheryl L. Mother-Daughter Relationship During Early Adolescence and its Influence on Sexual Initiation Prior to age 16 in the Daughter. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, Graduate Program in Nursing, 2009.

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Numerous studies have examined locus of control and self-efficacy as predictors of individual differences in the human experience including unemployment, health, homelessness, occupational choice, and academic performance. Most of these studies have found that control over life outcomes and judged capability to perform a given action influence future goals and attainment including outcomes in education, work skills, labor market experience, and demographic characteristics (such as fertility and marriage). In contrast, most of the current research on the socioeconomic attainment of welfare recipients focuses on human capital characteristics and family background variables. What is largely overlooked in the welfare literature is an analysis of how self-beliefs formed and measured early in life influence future goals and attainment. This dissertation examines the effects of locus of control and self-efficacy on the likelihood of welfare use, five-year outcomes, and wages of former welfare recipients using data from the 1979 through 2000 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Binary logistic regression estimates confirm that social psychological characteristics formed early in life are initially related to welfare use. As expected, women with external locus of control and low occupational self-efficacy are more likely to receive welfare than those with an internal locus. While the social psychological predictors do not appear to have strong or robust direct effects on welfare outcomes past initial entry or on socioeconomic attainment five years following an initial exposure, occupational self-efficacy provides a notable exception. The effects of classical predictors of welfare outcomes, human capital and family background characteristics, appear to have the strongest effects on the likelihood of ever receiving welfare, five-year welfare outcomes, and socioeconomic attainment. Results of this study suggest that more research on the effect of social psychological predictors on welfare outcomes and long term socioeconomic attainment of welfare recipients should be conducted where changes in locus of control and self-efficacy using a domain-specific construct are measured after initial exposure to welfare. As it stands, the results of this dissertation have important implications for the current welfare system, especially concerning time restrictions and self-sufficiency goals.

Bibliography Citation

Kozimor-King, Michele Lee. You Have to Believe: The Effects of Locus Of Control and Self-Efficacy on Welfare Use and Long-Term Outcomes. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2005. DAI-A 66/04, p. 1516, Oct 2005.

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The following presents three essays on racial disparities in human capital investments and returns to skill over the life-cycle. The first chapter, "The Source of Black-White Inequality in Early Language Acquisition: Evidence from Early Head Start, " addresses the source and timing of divergence in the accumulation of early childhood skills between black and white children. The second chapter, "The Effects of the Jeanes and Rosenwald Funds on Black Education by 1930: Comparing Returns on Investments in Teachers and Schools," estimates the combined and comparative effects of two large philanthropies targeting rural black schools in the segregated South. The third chapter, "Blurring the Color Line: Wages and Employment for Black Males of Different Skin Tones," co-authored with Marcos Rangel, tests for wage differentials within race, across skin color, utilizing a measure of skin tone placed in a prominent social survey. Taken together, these essays evaluate the role race plays in inequality above and beyond what can be explained away by racial disparities in wealth, family circumstances, prior education and other comparable measures. Each essay is written from a human capital perspective, drawing on literature in economics, public policy and education, seeking to broaden our understanding of the incongruous relationship between race and inequality in America.

Bibliography Citation

Kreisman, Daniel M. Three Essays on Race and Human Capital. Ph.D. Dissertation, Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, The University of Chicago, 2012.

You Can't Buy Marital Quality, Can You? A Study of the Effects of Income and Its Sources on Marital Quality
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1997
Cohort(s):
NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Family Income; Income; Marital Conflict; Marital Satisfaction/Quality; Mothers

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Using data from the NLSY, this study tests the hypothesis that there is a curvilinear relationship between income and two dimensions of marital quality--marital happiness and marital conflict for married mothers. The curvilinear relationship is hypothesized to be strongest at lower income levels. Alternatively, spline analysis explores the possibility of a threshold relationship. Prior research on the relationship between income and marital quality has had inconsistent findings; early research found a significant relationship while later research has generally failed to find a significant relationship. At a theoretical level, there is reason to believe that income and marital quality should be related. The analysis finds a curvilinear relationship between marital quality and family income, a relationship that does not depend on the proportion of income earned by the husband. Reconciling the results from several analytic strategies, it appears that the sharpest improvement in both dimensions of marital quality occurs between incomes of $0 and $10,000. Failure to include the poorest group may explain why some studies find a weak relationship between income and marital quality.

Bibliography Citation

Lacy, Naomi L. You Can't Buy Marital Quality, Can You? A Study of the Effects of Income and Its Sources on Marital Quality. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1997.

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An emerging strategy in higher education and workforce development policy circles aims to raise local, state, and national degree attainment rates by targeting those who left postsecondary education after earning significant college credits but without completing a degree. This dissertation examines some of the assumptions behind these programs testing whether these "near completers" who return to finish a degree receive a positive economic return compared to those who do not return to finish a degree. Additionally, this research examines whether their outcomes are impacted by the sector (either public, private non-profit, or private for-profit) of the college or university at which they complete their degree. Finally, this study examines whether individual characteristics affect the likelihood that an individual who has stopped out of college will return to complete a degree. Overall, I find that the economic return varies across racial/ethnic background and that not all subgroups earn a positive return from finishing a degree, but returns do not differ by sector. Finally, I find that many of the factors generally associated with increased educational attainment do not appear to have a relationship with the likelihood of finishing a degree.

Bibliography Citation

Lane, Patrick David. The Return on Returning: The Economic Benefit of Baccalaureate Degree Completion after Stopping Out. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Denver, 2015.

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How to promote child health has been the focus of much debate among scholars, policy makers, and practitioners. Yet, research on reliably measuring subjective aspects of child health over time as well as on how family structure and income support policies may influence child health is limited. This dissertation is comprised of three papers that focus on these topics.
The first paper examines how socioeconomic and psychosocial factors affect agreement between parental proxy reports and children's self-reports of children's health related quality of life. Results show that parental mental health status, education, work, and health literacy are associated with the consistency of these reports, suggesting that parent and child reports are not interchangeable and that their level of agreement may be influenced by a host of family characteristics.

The second paper investigates differences in health insurance coverage for children whose parents cohabit and those whose parents are married, with a focus on families that include a social (non-biological) parent. Child health insurance coverage may vary as a function of differences in access to economic resources and differences in access to employer sponsored health insurance policies between family structures. Results from this paper suggest children in cohabiting and social-father families are more likely to have public and less likely to have private coverage than those in (married) two-biological parent families.

The final paper uses an instrumental variables strategy to examine associations of an exogenous change in income due to expansions in the Earned income Tax Credit with family health behaviors, child health outcomes, and children's health insurance coverage. Results suggest that children in families that experience an exogenous increase in income are more likely to be covered by (private) health insurance, to have gone to the dentist in the previous year, and to be reported by their mother as being in excellent health.

This dissertation has implications for better understanding factors that place children at risk for health problems as well as for identify pathways by which social policy programs and the healthcare system can promote optimal quality of life for low-income children and families.

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The final essay, written jointly with Brittany Teahan, investigates potential unintended consequences of unemployment insurance (UI) policy on alcohol use and abuse. Using NLSY data supplemented with Geocode data, we estimate the effect of benefit replacement rates on changes in individual alcohol consumption following job loss. Identification relies on variation in replacement rates across states and over time. We find evidence that income effects from increased benefits dominate potential stress reducing benefits of UI. Moreover, we find that increased benefits increase the likelihood an individual abuses alcohol following job loss. Individuals' responsiveness to changes in replacement rates varies based on drinking history. We find that individuals with no history of alcohol abuse are the most sensitive to changes in UI policy.

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This dissertation consists of two essays on youth criminal behavior and drug use using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). The first essay examines the relationship between youth employment and criminal behavior and drug use allowing for endogeneity of the choice variables. Using a recursive bivariate probit model, the results indicate that whether employment is beneficial or harmful to youths depends on the level of work intensity. While working at high intensity, defined as 20-39 hours per week, encourages involvement in criminal activity and drug use, working at low intensity, defined as 1-9 hours per week, discourages it. The evidence suggests that youths who work are more involved with marijuana use and nonviolent crimes involving drugs and money than violent crimes. Policies designed to limit hours of youth employment or reduce concentration of youths in the workplace in order to minimize negative social interaction can be beneficial to youths who choose to work.

The second essay analyzes the extent to which the School-To-Work (STW) programs impact youth criminal behavior and drug use. In 1994, President Clinton signed the School-To-Work Opportunity Act (STWOA) to address a national skills shortage for students who pursue little or no education beyond high school. Using the Heckman sample selection model, the results indicate four types of program impacts--negative, positive, mixed, and none--where negative indicates a decrease and positive an increase in the probability of engaging in illegal behavior. Mentoring and technical preparation programs lower the probability of committing crimes and using drugs. Programs deemed unfavorable because participation in those programs is positively associated with crimes and drug use are school-sponsored enterprise and cooperative education programs. Two programs that demonstrate mixed results, a negative impact on crimes but a positive impact on drug use, are the job shadowing and the internship programs. The only program not related to youth criminal behavior and drug use is the career major program.

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Chapters Three and Four use different data sets to empirically test the effect of high mortgage loan to home value on a number of health outcomes. Chapter Three employs the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), a rich, nationally representative sample of the population over 50 years of age and finds significant correlation between high mortgage loan to value and negative health outcomes. Changes in home values are used as an instrument variable to further identify the effect of loan to value on health; results are not conclusive of causality. Chapter Four uses the NLSY79 to explore the effect of mortgage debt on a younger cohort that, in comparison to the HRS, is more likely to rely on wage income and have lower net worth. Results point to higher loan to value in conjunction with unemployment as having a significant negative impact on health for this cohort, but higher loan to value alone does not significantly affect overall health.

Bibliography Citation

Lau, Catherine. Essays on Effects of the Housing Market Collapse. Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 2012.

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The second paper responds to Mare's (2011) call to pay attention to the causes of family background effects. I begin by conceptualizing parents' completed educational attainment as an outcome influenced by parents' high school curricula. Tracing parents' schooling experiences back reinforces the distinction Duncan made between the distribution of a status within a sample of parents and the distribution of a status within parents' generations. To account for that difference, I estimate the effect of a mother's high school academic program on her eventual attainment using probabilities calculated among all the women in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979, not only those who eventually had a child in the Children and Young Adults Survey. I compare the effects of a mother's curricular type and her eventual attainment on the probability that her child would be in a college preparatory curriculum in high school. I find that the total effect of having a mother who was in a college preparatory academic program is equal to the direct effect of having a mother who completed college. Decomposing that total effect shows that a mother's earlier educational experiences matter not only because they allowed her to reach a certain level of schooling, but because they have independent "lingering effects" on her child's opportunities.

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This dissertation studies how the interaction between human capital and technological change determines the trends in wage inequality in the United States. Since the late 1980s, the US labor market has been characterized by rising "wage polarization," a phenomenon involving the rise in employment shares of the low and high earners in the labor market. Recently, leading economists hypothesized that the information computer technology (ICT) revolution which raised demand for high pay cognitive occupations, is responsible for wage polarization. Their theory is commonly known as the "routinization hypothesis." The first chapter of my thesis questions whether the ICT revolution actually raises the demand for high pay cognitive jobs in place of middle pays non-cognitive jobs. Replicating regression analyses in the literature, I find that exposure to ICT is indeed associated with higher individual wage growth for cognitive workers. When individual cognitive ability is factored in, however, cognitive occupation per se no longer gives an edge over others in gaining from ICT. This result suggests that underlying the observed rise in demand for cognitive occupations is a complementary relationship between ICT and cognitive ability. In the second chapter, I observe that occupational mobility has a crucial role in workers' attainment of cognitive occupations, which is generally abstracted away by the routinization hypothesis. Using an economic model widely used in the literature on post-schooling earnings, I demonstrate that in order to provide a better understanding of the changes in occupational structure of the labor force, the routinization hypothesis must be supported by a theory based on occupational mobility. The last chapter studies the interaction between technological change and the supply of educated workers. It is applied in the context of international trade to show that exposure to trade does not necessarily lead to rising wage inequality if the education system can sufficiently support rising demand for education.

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For many decades, the American Dream of homeownership has been a source of pride and one of the traditional ways to improve financial and non-financial well-being for American households. However, during the recent housing crisis, millions of homeowners lost their homes or experienced negative home equity due to job loss, reductions in work hours, or a decline in home values. The recent housing crisis made many individuals and families rethink their American Dream. As with most investments, there are some risks associated with owning a home, especially when housing markets are volatile and the economy is uncertain. Understanding the relationship between household's risk preference and homeownership decisions may help households make better and more informed decisions regarding their housing tenure choice. This study investigates the relationship between household's risk preference and homeownership decisions among young adults made during the stability in the housing market, which occurred around 1993, and during the decline in the housing market, which occurred around 2010. This study also examined demographic and economic characteristics of homeowners during those periods.

Two separate datasets from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 were utilized to address research questions and research hypotheses under the lens of the expected utility theory. The results showed shifts in household's risk preferences, homeownership rates, and demographic and economic characteristics between periods. Compared to households who preferred lowest risk level, households who preferred highest risk level were more likely to own a home in both periods. The relationships between household’s risk preference and homeownership decisions did not change between periods. However, some relationships between household's demographic and economic characteristics and homeownership decisions changed between periods.

Bibliography Citation

Le, Vincent C. The Relationship between Household's Risk Preference and the Homeownership Decisions among Young Adults in Changing Housing Market Conditions. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Programs in General Human Ecology, Kansas State University, 2018.

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This dissertation examined effects and paths between children's delinquent and criminal behaviors and parenting styles using interactional theory. The author used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort (NLSY 97). In order to determine parenting styles, a hierarchical clustering method was used, together with Baumrind's (1971) categorization of parenting styles as authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. For the main analysis, this study employed path analysis. The results showed that children's criminal and delinquent behaviors had greater effects on parenting styles than parents had on children's delinquent and criminal behaviors. Although this study did not find the hypothesized patterned paths between parenting styles and children's delinquent and criminal behaviors, the results for effects of parenting styles and children's delinquent and criminal behaviors showed how those relationships influence each other.

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This dissertation explores the effect of cognitive and noncognitive skills on three socioeconomic outcomes: wage differentials, individual patterns of educational assortative mating, and the socioeconomic consequences of teen motherhood. Although research has been keen on identifying early predictors of socioeconomic attainment, a systematic view of the linkages between individuals' own attributes formed in childhood and adolescence and subsequent outcomes has yet to come. In this project, I seek to fill this gap by identifying cognitive and noncognitive skills as a micro basis of socioeconomic inequality. Correlated but distinct from cognitive skills, noncognitive skills are conceptualized as enduring dispositions that represent a form of cultural capital. Because both types of skills are highly dependent on socioeconomic background, I hypothesized that individual-level skill differences function as a key channel through which intergenerational mobility is associated with various forms of socioeconomic inequality.

This study begins by examining the impact of both cognitive and noncognitive skills on between- and within-education group wage inequality, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and quantile regressions. While the economic return to education has been proposed as a parsimonious explanation for rising wage inequality and its currently high level, this account focuses mainly on between-education group wage inequality and the demand for cognitive skills. Results from my analysis shows that (1) while the economic return to education is the robust explanation for wage inequality, both cognitive and noncognitive skills contribute significantly to reducing the college wage premium and wage dispersions within college graduates; (2) noncogntive skills play a more pronounced role in wage inequality among college graduates; and (3) the wage effect of both skills as an early predictor of earnings strengthens as workers reach
their prime ages in the labor market. These findings suggest that the family may be an important institutional actor responsible for wage inequality.

In the subsequent chapter, I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and the NLSY79 to investigate the role of cognitive and noncognitive skills in individual patterns of educational assortative mating in adolescence and adulthood. This paper argues that to the extent that skill differences are associated with education-based mate selection, intergenerational mobility operates at an intimate level of the mate selection process. Multinomial logistic regression results show that cognitive and noncognitive skills are positively associated with the probability of transitioning into marrying college graduates and, to a lesser degree, with that of dating college-bound partners. I also find a gender difference in the role of skill differences: noncognitive skills play a more salient role in education-based mate sorting for women, whereas it is cognitive skills that primarily do so for men, indicating a normative attitude toward mate selection that regards "smartness" as more attractive to women than to men. These findings imply that the intergenerational transmission of familial resources affects children's mate selection by not simply investing in their educational attainment but also strengthening their cognitive and noncognitive skills.

Finally, I reevaluate the socioeconomic effect of teenage childbearing. Despite a 30-year debate about the consequences of adolescent fertility, finding its "true" effect still has been elusive. This concern stems from (1) theoretical considerations of early motherhood as a harmful event and/or its higher likelihood among disadvantaged young women and (2) methodological challenges against selection bias. Alternative models have been developed, but tend to rely on strong assumptions and unrepresentative samples. This paper exten
ds
the extant literature by taking a counterfactual approach using propensity score matching, conducting a sensitivity analysis employing the Rosenbaum bounds to address selection bias on unobserved covariates, and using data from Add Health. Results show that while teen mothers' preexisting socioeconomic disadvantages and their lower level of cognitive and noncognitive skills play a nontrivial role, teen motherhood has significantly negative effects on early socioeconomic outcomes with the exception of public assistance receipt. The sensitivity analysis suggests that selection bias due to unobserved covariates would have to be very powerful to nullify these findings.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Dohoon. Three Essays on the Micro Basis of Socioeconomic Inequality: The Role of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008.

Relationships Between Mothers' Working Conditions and Young Children's Home Environments and Early Development
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.
Also: http://gradworks.umi.com/33/01/3301176.html
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
Child Development; Home Environment; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Job Satisfaction; Maternal Employment; Motor and Social Development (MSD); Working Conditions

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The purpose of this study was to examine relations between various aspects of maternal working conditions, including hours worked, number of jobs, total earnings, availability of benefits, occupational complexity, work schedule, and job satisfaction, and young children's (ages 0 to 47 months) motor, social, and cognitive development. This study also investigated whether maternal working conditions are related to the quality of home environments for young children indicated by the level of cognitive stimulation and emotional support provided by mothers at home. In addition, this study explored whether the cognitive and emotional home environments mediate relationships between maternal working conditions and young children's development. Testing whether the relationships between maternal working conditions and young children's development differ by family poverty and mothers' marital status was the final objective of this study. The study analyzed data from two samples of working mothers with young children (N = 699; N = 613) extracted from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the NLSY mother-child data sets. The data sets are longitudinal and intergenerational and include extensive information on maternal background, such as employment, education, and poverty status, and developmental assessments of the mothers' children. The main statistical method was multiple regression analysis.

Study results indicated that of the work variables only job dissatisfaction was statistically significant, and it was negatively related to young children's development. Testing the relationship between maternal working conditions and the quality of the cognitive and emotional home environments of young children revealed that working fewer hours, compared to working full-time, was associated with more enriched cognitively simulating home environments and that total earnings were positively related to the level of mothers' emotional support at home. Results also showed that availability of benefits is a predictor of the quality of home environments. Availability of a flexible hours benefit was positively related to the level of cognitive stimulation that mothers provided to their children. However, mothers who had a paid sick and vacation days combined benefit available were found to provide less cognitively stimulating home environments. The cognitive and emotional home environments did not mediate the relation between job dissatisfaction and young children's development. None of the interactions between maternal working conditions and marital and poverty status met the criteria for statistical significance.

The findings of the study are discussed in terms of implications for social policy and social work intervention. Based on the results of the study, directions for future research are briefly discussed.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Hyun Jung. Relationships Between Mothers' Working Conditions and Young Children's Home Environments and Early Development. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007..

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Mental health is one of several important factors to sustain one's well-being, and as such, poor mental health can lead to significant problems in one's quality of life. Although mental illnesses are prevalent in middle-aged adults and the importance of mental health in general has been discussed in many studies, mental health across middle-aged adults has received less attention. Levels of depression have changed over time and lack of economic resources influences mental health. The purpose of this study is to examine trajectories of mental health among middle-aged adults, to investigate which factors influence the trajectories of mental health, and to explore the effects of economic well-being on mental health during middle age.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), which is a nation-wide representative data set for individuals in the United States, was used for analysis. A sample of 834 individuals who discussed their mental health status at four points in time (34, 36, 40, and 50 years of age) was analyzed. The latent growth model was conducted using M-plus statistical package. The research questions are as follows: 1) What are the trajectories of mental health among middle aged-adults (34 to 50 years of age)? 2) Is economic well-being (net worth and employment) associated with mental health?

Major findings reported in this study were that the trajectories of mental health show non-linear change, with lowest levels of depression at 40 and higher levels of depression at 34, 36, and 50 years of age. Male, self-esteem, cognitive ability, health insurance, employment, and net worth predicted lower intercepts of depression. In addition, even after including time-varying covariates, the trajectories of mental health still show non-linear change. Employment was associated with lower risks of depression at 34, 36, 40, and 50 years, and net worth was also associated with lower risks of depression at 34, 36, and 50 years.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Jaewon. Trajectories of Mental Health and the Impact of Economic Well-Being across Middle Aged Adults. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, Michigan State University, 2018.

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This dissertation focuses on the interrelationship of socioeconomic outcomes of women...In the third chapter, I look at the role of teenage women's anticipated future labor force attachment in explaining the upward trend in U.S. women's college-going. Combined with the trend towards higher work expectations of young women across birth cohorts, the results suggest that teenagers' future work expectations may account in part for the upward trends in women's college attendance and completion.

Essays on High School Accountability and College Readiness
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2011
Cohort(s):
NLSY97
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
College Education; College Graduates; Earnings; Educational Attainment; Geocoded Data; High School; High School Completion/Graduates; High School Curriculum

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This dissertation contributes timely evidence to the debate surrounding which policies may be most effective at raising college- and career- readiness in the United States. While over 75% of people in the U.S. graduate from high school, less than 25% of the population possesses a college degree. Over 60% of college students are required to take remedial coursework, which does not count for college credit. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Geocode, we provide a portrait of college readiness in the United States and discuss how it has been affected by popular high school accountability policies. We then examine the returns to education for students who have been impacted by these policies. Part I discusses different measures of college readiness, comparing their predictive power for success in college. Unlike previous research, our data allow us to examine curricular measures of high school and college readiness in addition to binary measures of educational attainment. After an exploratory analysis of these measures, we examine trends in college readiness over time in the U.S., detailed further within various socioeconomic groups and geographic regions. These college readiness measures are shown to provide information that is distinct from high school graduation rates when predicting college remediation and college graduation. Part II focuses on two types of high school accountability policies that emphasize basic proficiency: high school exit exams and consequential accountability. We develop a simple framework of high school behavior to predict how high schools will target their resources after these policies are implemented. We test the predictions of this model for college readiness. Our measures of college readiness are: the difficulty of students' hardest high school math course, high school completion, attending college without taking remedial math (college preparation), and college graduation by age 23. Identification is based on variation
in the timing of state policies, controlling for state-invariant factors, time-varying national shocks, and regional time trends. We conclude that both policies decrease high school coursework difficulty and college preparation, but consequential accountability also decreases rates of high school completion and college graduation by age 23. These trends are not due to higher rates of GED attainment or lower college attendance, which suggests that these accountability policies lowered college readiness of college-goers. The last part of this dissertation addresses longer-term outcomes for students by examining how educational attainment and earnings have been impacted by these school accountability policies. After documenting an overall decrease in educational attainment, we find evidence of heterogeneous impacts by student ability prior to high school and school resources that imply increasing inequality in educational attainment across schools. Then, a two-stage least squares approach is used to measure the returns to schooling for students whose educational attainment was impacted by these policies. We find an earnings return to education of about 10% per completed grade, which is in line with previous literature using education policies as instruments for schooling.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Joanne Jiyun. Essays on High School Accountability and College Readiness. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2011.

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Many children are attending early educational programs at an earlier age than ever before. This trend is reflected in the age composition of enrollees in the Head Start program. Despite these changes, evaluations of Head Start have not acknowledged children's entry ages until recently. The present study was designed based on a theoretical foundation that presumes the positive effects of an earlier intervention and the understanding of ecological human development. The aim of the proposed study is to examine how entering the Head Start Program at an early age impacts children's short- and long-term developmental outcomes. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data, a sample of 603 children was selected from those who participated in Head Start in 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1994. The specific study questions addressed were: (1) Is there a relationship between the age of entering Head Start and children's academic and behavioral outcomes at ages 5-6?; (2) Is there a relationship between the age of entering Head Start and children's academic and behavioral outcomes at ages 11-12?; and (3) Is there an association between the short-term and long-term outcomes? Additionally, this study will consider how each of these associations differs depending on maternal education, controlling for individual, family, and contextual characteristics. Findings indicated that entering Head Start at age 3 was positively associated with both short- and long-term outcomes; additionally, the short-term outcomes were significantly associated with the long-term. These positive effects were more pronounced for children whose mothers had higher levels of education. Policy implications suggest that children should be enrolled in Head Start by age 3 with concurrent family support systems in order to maximize their short- and long-term benefits. Additionally, future evaluation studies of Head Start should include both short- and long-term outcomes and consider various individual, fam
ily, and societal characteristics to determine its true benefits.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Kyunghee. The Impacts of an Early Entry Age Into the Head Start Program on Children's Developmental Outcomes. Ph. D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2007. DAI-A 68/06, Dec 2007.

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The purposes of this study are to examine migration disparities in primary, onward, and return migration by Hispanics, non-Hispanic black, and non-Hispanic white and to inspect the differences among the various types of migration. In addition, this study explores explanations of the migration disparities. These have been rarely studied because of a lack of proper migration data. This research employs the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79) for a logistic regression of primary migration and for a hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM) of the two types of repeat migration, namely onward and return. The results demonstrate that whites are more likely to make primary and onward migrations compared to blacks and Hispanics. But, with return migration, significant differences between whites and other minorities are not found. With respect to the contributors or explanations, this study indicates that the racial/ethnic migration disparities are not explained by socioeconomic status as opposed to explanations by human capital perspectives. The racial/ethnic disparities in migrations seem to be produced by discrimination and an unequal distribution of opportunities. Return migration presents several interesting different patterns compared with the other type migrations, including the effects of age and educational attainment. For return migration, old and less educated individuals have higher odds, showing reversed pattern of total, primary, and onward migration. The findings seem to indicate that different characteristics are involved in different types of migration.

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Even though unidimensional item response theory (IRT) provides a better framework for practical test settings than classical test theory (CTT), theoretical and empirical evidence shows that most response data violate the assumption of unidimensionality. There are several computer programs dedicated to estimating parameters based on the multidimensional perspective (MIRT). However, their accessibility is still costly, and they are not easy to use. In this paper, we present a SAS macro called MDIRT-FIT, to increase accessibility to the benefits obtained from this recent measurement theory development. The program is developed to estimate parameters based on a compensatory multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) model for dichotomous data. The full information item factor analysis model with an EM algorithm suggested in Bock & Aitken (1988) is implemented in the SAS programs. The estimation program written in SAS/IML® provides both parameters of MIRT and parameters of the factor analysis model with their associated standard errors and overall model fit statistics. The maximum number of latent traits that can be estimated with this program is limited to five latent dimensions because of both computational burden and practical sufficiency. The accuracy and stability of the SAS macro is examined by utilizing simulated data of examinees' responses. The PIAT math test, a subset of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test, was examined to validate the comparability of the SAS macro to TESTFACT which is widely used for estimating parameters of MIRT models.

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Since welfare reform legislation in 1996, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) has been implemented. Under TANF, most recipients are required to work. Work requirements for welfare mothers might affect their children in various ways. For example, a mother's work experience might improve her self-esteem, motivation, and a sense of personal control as well as family income. As a result, she might be able to provide better parenting, which, in turn, could affect her children positively. On the other hand, if a mother lacks adequate child care or coping skills to manage work stress, work requirements under TANF might affect her children negatively. However, there has been little scholarship addressing how welfare reform affects children.

This study examined the direct and indirect effects of welfare participation on child development. In particular, the study focused on understanding the underlying pathway through which welfare participation affects child development.

This study analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY), which included children born between 1990 and 1999. The NLSY was particularly useful because it provided various measures of child development. To examine the underlying pathway, a structural equation model was employed, in which the mother's employment, cognitive stimulation, and engagement with children were included as mediating variables. The model also took into account state policy variations as moderating variables.

This study found that welfare participation had no direct effect on children's developmental outcomes and the effects of welfare participation on children's outcomes were mediated by parenting practices and maternal employment. With regard to parenting practices, two distinct pathways were observed. First, maternal welfare participation had indirect effects on children's cognitive outcomes through cognitive stimulation. Children whose mother participated in the welfare p
rogram had less cognitive stimulation at home, which, in turn, was negatively associated with children's cognitive outcomes. The second pathway involves parental engagements with children. Mothers who received welfare benefits were less likely to warmly interact with their children and/or less likely to provide a safe environment for their children. These poor parenting practices were associated with more childhood behavioral problems.

This study also found that maternal employment had a negative effect on children's outcomes through parental engagement. Moreover, the negative effect of maternal employment was stronger among children who were born after TANF was implemented.

Finally, this study generally showed that variations in state welfare policies did not systematically affect the relationship between maternal welfare participation and parenting practices. One exception is that the more lenient work requirement policy appeared to moderate the negative effect of welfare participation on parental engagement.

These findings suggest that the negative effect of welfare participation on child development can be reduced by increasing children's cognitive stimulation and mother-child engagement, implying that states should invest more in the programs that promote children's cognitive development and improve parenting skills as a strategic point of intervention to mitigate the detrimental impact of work requirements on children under TANF.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Wonik. The Effects of Maternal Welfare Participation on Children's Developmental Outcomes in the Welfare Reform Era. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, Social Work, 2010..

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This dissertation investigates the effects of the provision of flexible work hours and company-provided child care on the wages of women, specifically regarding women with child care responsibilities, using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1989 to 2000.

To examine the association between women's wages and the availability of flexible work hours and company-provided child care, three sets of alternative hypotheses are tested. First, the availability of such policies might be positively related to the wages of women and associated with a decrease in child wage penalties. Using Ordinary Least Squares and fixed effects models, this study finds evidence to support this, substantiating the belief that working women with the provisions of such policies receive higher wages than working women without the provisions. In addition, the wage premiums associated with such policies sufficiently offset the well-known child wage penalty.

Second, the wage effects associated with such policies will still be persistent, even after controlling for a wide range of confounding covariates, including demographic variable, human capital, and job characteristics. Using the longitudinal data to control for such confounding covariates, this dissertation finds that different accumulations of human capital, in part, account for wage differentials between women who have such policy provisions and women who do not. But, the significant wage premiums created by flexible work hours and company-provided child care are still substantial, even after controlling for demographic, human capital, and job characteristics. Moreover, the association between the provision of such policies and women's wages vary by industry and occupation.

Third, there might be causal relationship between the provisions of such policies and higher wages of working women and both might be due to time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity. Using fixed effects models, this dissertation finds very little evidence to support this.

To test the differential effects of flexible work hours and company-provided child care on wages of women, this study uses propensity score matching and finds wage premiums for both working mothers and nonmothers (flexible work hours) and for only working mothers (company-provided child care). Moreover, combining the matching and regression adjustment on the matched sample, this study finds significantly and substantially lower wages for working mothers than their nonmother counterparts, as a result of motherhood status, when both groups have the availability of such policies as well as when both groups do not have such policies.

The primary policy implication of this study is that developing and expanding flexible work hours and child care provisions should create a better balance between parental employment and family responsibilities and, as a consequence, a secure source of income undiluted by a wage penalty for motherhood. Other policy implications are that enriching family benefit packages, such as more generous child-related leave and tax and benefit policies, would help address the balance between work and family needs, serving to increase the wages not only for working women but for women in general. Finding new venues that reconcile the roles of government with work organizations is proposed to create greater balance between work and family life for working women.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Yeon-Shim. Effects of Flexible Work Hours and Company-Provided Child Care on Wages of Mothers and Other Women. Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2005.

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Research on the transition to adulthood dates back nearly four decades, but a growing body of research has taken a new approach by investigating multiple demographic markers in the transition to adulthood simultaneously. Using the life course perspective, this dissertation is built on the literature by first examining contemporary young adults' pathways to adulthood from ages 18 to 30 and their differences by gender. Data for this study were drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997; the final sample included 2,185 men and 2,086 women. The college-educated single workers pathway, the college-educated married working parents pathway, and the high-school-educated single parents pathway were identified in both genders. For men, the study also identified the high-school-educated single workers pathway and the high-school-educated married working parents pathway. For women, the study also identified the high-school-educated workers pathway and the high-school-educated married parents pathway. Not only did the definitions of some pathways differ by gender, but even in the pathways with the same definition, gender differences were found in the probabilities of being married, of being a parent, or of being employed full-time.

Based on the pathways to adulthood identified, this research examined the family and adolescent precursors and whether race moderates the associations between family structure experiences and young adults' pathways to adulthood. Parental education, family structure, GPA, delinquency, early sexual activity, and race/ethnicity were the family and adolescent precursors that distinguished among pathways taken by the youth. Two interactions between race and family structure/instability were identified. The positive association between growing up in a single-parent family and the odds of taking the high-school-educated single workers pathway compared to the college-educated married working parents pathway was weaker for Black males than for White males. The positive association between family instability and the odds of taking the college-educated single workers pathway compared to the college-educated married working parents pathway was weaker for Black females than for White females.

This dissertation accounted for changes in the multiple statuses related to becoming an adult by following contemporary young adults for 12 years. More research on contemporary young adults' pathways to adulthood and subgroup differences in the effects of precursors are recommended. Limitations and implications of this study are discussed.

Bibliography Citation

Lee, Yoonjoo. Pathways to Adulthood and Their Precursors: Roles of Gender and Race. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Family Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, 2016.

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This dissertation places gender and race at the center of three individual essays focusing adolescent health risk behaviors. Specifically, data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) are used to explore risky sex behavior and violence among adolescents. The first paper investigates the relationship between gender role attitudes and sexual behavior. It argues that moderate gender attitudes---distinct from both extremely liberal attitudes and extremely traditional attitudes---are associated with safer sexual practice among teen girls. The second paper is concerned with teen boys' sexual practices and level of violence. Analyses suggest that limited school-based social resources are associated with problem behaviors among White adolescents, and associations are stronger among adolescents with more traditional gender attitudes. The third paper uses obesity among teen girls as an example of the relationship between limited social resources and sexual behavior. This study finds that obesity among White adolescents is associated with lower rates of teen sexual experience, but higher rates of risky sexual practices. Taken as a whole, the three papers suggest that the culturally relative construction of gender plays a central role in violence and risky sexual behavior among U.S. teens.

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The main objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between the generosity of the unemployment insurance (UI) system and the duration of post-unemployment jobs. A theoretical framework is developed that distinguishes between two opposite effects of UI on subsequent employment durations: a direct positive effect operating through the positive relationship between the reservation wage and job match quality, and an indirect negative effect operating through the negative relationship between the duration of unemployment and job match quality. In addition, a distinction is made between the impact of past UI benefit payments and the impact of future UI benefit entitlements. A critical review of the relevant empirical research is provided, and an improved empirical strategy is presented by developing a multiple-spell two-state competing-risk hazard model with endogenous UI receipt. The proposed model has three components: the equation for the receipt of UI, the equations for the duration of unemployment (which distinguish between unemployment spells that end in recalls and unemployment spells that end in new jobs), and the equations for the duration of subsequent employment (which distinguish between employment spells that end in quits and employment spells that end in layoffs). The model is estimated using 1978-2002 weekly panel data derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). The NLSY79 is an ongoing survey sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor that is based on a nationally representative sample of 12,686 individuals who were between 14 and 21 years old as of December 31, 1978, and who were residing in the U.S. on January 1, 1979. Results from policy simulations based on the hazard model estimates indicate that a 10 percent increase in the weekly benefit amount raises the expected duration of post-unemployment jobs by 2 to 4 weeks.

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A growing body of literature explores the relationship between body composition and income in the United States. There are two views: (1) overweight and obesity lead to lower wages; and (2) low family income and low wages contribute to overweight and obesity. I study both relationships using a dataset comprised of the most recent years of data available in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.

I find relatively larger effects of body composition on wage levels in Not Worth the Weight: The Relationship between Body Composition and Wages, and relatively smaller effects of family income on body composition in Poor Choices: The Effects of Family Income on Body Composition. In Not Worth the Weight, I hypothesize that the negative impact of body composition increases at higher wage levels because the associated positions require additional education and perhaps a slimmer figure. The results show that for women, the effects of body composition on wage levels are larger than for men, and a higher wage level is associated with a higher wage penalty for being overweight. Poor Choices is unable to prove that low family income has a significantly large impact on body composition.

In The Heavy Cost of Healthcare: The Ex Ante Moral Hazard Effect of Health Insurance Possession on Body Composition, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, augmented with state-level food and tobacco prices, in an attempt to prove there is ex ante moral hazard associated with the possession of health insurance such that the insured are more likely to be overweight or obese. I hypothesize that the effect is larger when an individual is covered by government health insurance and smaller when the individual is covered by private insurance. The analysis shows that the ex ante moral hazard effect is larger when Medicaid covers the individual. When I control for individual fixed effects as well as endogeneity, however, results are insignificant. Thus it is inconclusive
whether insurance has an impact on body composition. I conclude with suggestions for future research and effective policies to combat the public health epidemic of overweight and obesity.

Bibliography Citation

Lempert, David A. The Economic Causes and Consequences of Overweight and Obesity in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, City University of New York, 2014.

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The second paper identifies longitudinal trajectories of maternal weight from prepregnancy through the postpartum period and assesses the relationship between maternal weight trajectories and offspring obesity in childhood. The third paper determines if maternal history of physical abuse in childhood is related to the risk of offspring overweight in childhood, and whether prepregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain play mediating roles in such an association. These dissertation papers together provide valuable information to help determine ranges of weight gain during pregnancy that minimize risk of adverse infant and child health outcomes. They also intend to stimulate further research to establish a scientific evidence base for creating effective interventions and clinical gestational weight gain guidelines. Promoting healthy weight and weight gain in pregnancy presents a potentially feasible and effective opportunity to improve infant and child health.

Bibliography Citation

Leonard, Stephanie. Understanding the Relationship of Pregnancy Weight and Weight Change with Infant and Child Health. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Epidemiology, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

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The objective of this study is to determine whether financial literacy is able to moderate the effects of self-control on financial outcomes. Financial literacy is an oft cited solution to the myriad financial complexities faced by consumers. If financial literacy is effective it should help consumers overcome issues of self-control to encourage more fiscally responsible behaviors. Both economic and psychological theories of self-control are explored, and a conceptual model using the Big Five personality trait of conscientiousness as a measure of self-control is utilized.

Data for this study come from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the sample used in the study is comprised of 5,892 respondents. The measure of conscientiousness was collected in Round 13 as part of the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI). Financial literacy was assessed using three questions, collected in Round 11, on compounding interest, inflation, and stock risk. The five dependent variables modeled in this study are net worth, illiquid assets, liquid assets, credit card debt, and negative financial events. Multivariate linear and logistic regressions are used to analyze the data and an interaction term (financial literacy*conscientiousness) is used to test for moderating effects.

Bibliography Citation

Letkiewicz, Jodi C. Self-control, Financial Literacy, and the Financial Behaviors of Young Adults. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2012.

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Variant findings on the benefits and strains of combining employment and family roles encourage investigation into the mechanisms and conditions under which employment improves the well-being of individuals who perform the greatest amounts of family caregiving labor-- mothers caring for children. In this dissertation, I explore the effects of employment on depressive symptoms in light of gendered parental responsibilities. Two possible mechanisms through which employment may confer mental health benefits are explored: identity accumulation, and for married women, gains in relative spousal resources. First, motivated by symbolic interaction perspectives on identity, I examine how the mental health effects of employment for mothers vary according to their attitudes about the compatibility of employment and childrearing. Secondly, I draw on household bargaining and resource perspectives to examine whether the increase in relative spousal earnings generated by employment are associated with fewer depressive symptoms among married women. Finally, I approach the social roles of parenthood and employment from a life course perspective, considering their effects on the distribution of depressive symptoms by age for men and women. These analyses enrich understandings of how and when employment improves mental well-being, and highlight the force of gendered parental responsibilities in shaping the effects of work and family roles.

Higher Education and Social Inequality: The Role of Community Colleges
Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 2006. DAI-A 67/04, Oct 2006
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher:
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)Keyword(s):
College Education; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mothers, Education; Parent-Child Relationship/Closeness

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There is a consensus among sociologists that educational attainment is one of the most important influences on individuals' life chances. Despite a flowering of research on community college effects since the 1970s, there is less agreement over the effects of community college attendance than there is for four-year college attendance. Using nationally representative longitudinal datasets, the NLSY79 and the NELS:88, new statistical methods, and a broad range of outcomes, this dissertation reexamines the lengthy debate about the influence of community colleges in perpetuating a cycle of diminished educational and occupational attainments. This study is also the first to ask whether community colleges produce payoffs across the generations. This dissertation makes several novel contributions to research on community colleges. Because community college students take longer to complete degrees, I follow students for more years than previous studies. In addition to regression models, I use a statistical technique known as the Counterfactual Model of Causal Inference. This technique is considered superior to regression analysis in its treatment of selection bias. I will test whether some of the negative effects attributed to community colleges have been overestimated due to failure to control adequately for the characteristics of students. I compare community college students to both four-year college students and high school graduates. Fina